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A “King” that earns its crown, Peter Jackson’s final installment in his monumental “The Lord of the Rings” represents that filmmaking rarity — a third part of a trilogy that is decisively the best of the lot. With epic conflict, staggering battles, striking landscapes and effects, and resolved character arcs all leading to a dramatic conclusion to more than nine hours of masterful storytelling, “The Return of the King” is an urgently paced 200-minute film without an ounce of fat — until unfortunate multiple endings that go on and on, as if Jackson couldn’t bear to let go. In the rarefied world of large-scaled cinematic triptychs, three in the modern era quickly come to mind that, initially at least, combined striking cinematic prowess with enormous public enthusiasm: “The Godfather,” “Star Wars” and “The Matrix.” In the first two instances, the second film was by general consensus the best and most adventurous, while the third was by far the weakest across the boards. What Jackson and New Line so boldly did right was to shoot all three in one continuous stretch rather than start from scratch each time. Of all the wonders associated with this trio of films — the literate, generally well structured overall script, the perfection of the New Zealand locations, the visionary scenic designs, the exceptional visual effects, the costumes, hair and armor, and the excellent cast — perhaps the most impressive feat of all has been Jackson’s ability to keep it all in his head through the years and deliver a cohesive work with a proper sense of balance and proportion. Unlike his predecessors in the trilogy business, of course, Jackson had a ready-made three-part text to work from, one constructed to pay off in the climactic installment. And pay off it does, in ways guaranteed to satisfy the multitudes around the world who embraced the first two films, and even to impress non-card-carrying members of the massive Tolkien-Jackson cult. Still, anyone who hasn’t seen the first two pics won’t have a clue what’s going on at the outset of “The Return of the King.” With much struggle behind him but the worst yet to come, Frodo (Elijah Wood) is increasingly feeling the weight of being the Ringbearer as he and his faithful friend Sam (Sean Astin) make their way toward Mount Doom, the place where the Ring was made and the only place it can be destroyed, thus thwarting Sauron’s attempt to destroy humankind. In a way new to the trilogy, the emotional momentum surges along with the physical action. After early ambivalence over his responsibility for the Ring, Frodo grows into the job; after long dodging his royal inheritance, Aragorn finally rises to the occasion; Sam, especially, emerges as a three-dimensional character of intense devotion to Frodo even after he has been tricked by the Iago-like Gollum and exiled by his closest friend; and the ineffectual Hobbits Pippin and Merry take on some size, figuratively if not literally. The building sense of dread is palpable. With the belching Mount Doom and its all-powerful hovering Eye in the distance, humankind and Orcs alike traverse an already stark landscape that will shortly become scorched. Dreadful giant screeching dragons, called Fell Beasts, flap down out the sky to pluck hapless soldiers off their feet and horses. And the Orcs are assisted by yet more monsters, including Hulk-like Trolls and towering, long-tusked mastodons known as Mumakil, that strike terror and make resistance seem futile. With these forces massing to decide the fate of civilization, Gandalf tries to buy time for Frodo to plunge the Ring into the lava at Mount Doom. To greater effect than he has at any point in the three films, Jackson cuts among different sets of activity, the most spectacular being the battle and the most emotionally intense being Frodo’s painful, inch-by-inch journey. The siege of Minas Tirith may well be the mother of all cinematic battles; certainly no pre-CGI war film ever featured a scene involving upwards of 200,000 soldiers. But that’s how many Orcs maraud the city, and the details are extraordinary: the huge stones catapulted at the fortifications from mobile towers; the fire-breathing dragon battering ram that crashes through the main gates; the earth-shaking Mumakil that raze all before them with scythe-like tusks and carry dozens of men; the gradual movement of the battle from the ground to the upper levels of the exquisitely designed citadel. All of “The Lord of the Rings” has been building to this, and it delivers entirely. All the outstanding technical and craft achievements that have been duly honored in the previous installments are at least equaled and sometimes trumped here, especially in regard to how involved the creatures are this time. There has been no let-up in creativity, only intensification. So Jackson has done it. After seven years of work, Jackson has pulled off one of the most ambitious and phenomenally successful dream projects of all!

Certainly there can be few films so replete with images of death and portents of doom as is “The Two Towers.” At virtually every step, the mostly separated main characters are threatened with extinction, and looming over all is the specter of the gathering army of the dark wizard Saruman, whose victory would eliminate the last remaining bastion of significant resistance to his quest for total dominance over Middle-earth. “It’s getting heavier,” laments Frodo (Elijah Wood) about the Ring to his genial companion Sam (Sean Astin) as they make their way across some imposing mountains en route to the dreaded Mordor, the only place the Ring can be destroyed so as to prevent the Dark Lord Sauron from establishing an empire of evil. The two Hobbits aren’t alone for long, however, as they apprehend the strange, vaguely threatening but ultimately pathetic creature named Gollum that’s been following them and now offers to guide them to Mordor. But Gollum is an unsettling critter to have around. Naked save for a diaper-like loincloth, fidgety, skinny but large of hands, feet and skull, with strings of black hair and bulging, haunted blue eyes, Gollum looks like a preternatural Peter Lorre, a permanently scared and worried soul who’s compellingly revealed later on to be a hopeless schizophrenic, one twisted by his previous experience as a Ring bearer. “Acted” initially by Andy Serkis and subsequently reworked into exaggerated humanoid form via a dexterous CGI makeover, Gollum is a startling creation that constitutes one of the film’s major talking points. All the same, this odd group doesn’t actually get very far in “The Two Towers,” as matters focus more on the heroic efforts of the warriors Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen), Legolas (Orlando Bloom) and Gimli the Dwarf (John Rhys-Davies) to help King Theoden of Rohan (Bernard Hill) in his seemingly hopeless defense of Rohan against Saruman’s army of 10,000 specially bred fighting beasts. All things considered, the handsome Aragorn would rather be back with his lady love, Arwen (Liv Tyler), but when duty calls, a man such as he has no choice. Throughout, the film intercuts among a trio of story strands, the third recounting the strange detour of Frodo’s errant pals Merry (Dominic Monaghan) and Pippin (Billy Boyd) into Fangorn Forest, where they are snatched up by an ancient walking-and-talking tree called Treebeard (wonderfully voiced by the busy Rhys-Davies), who takes his own sweet time deciding what to do with the anxious Hobbits. Without pausing to recap past action, Jackson and his co-screenwriters Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Stephen Sinclair (the latter a new addition to the “Fellowship” trio) pick things up where they left off a year ago, and audiences will at once settle in for the yarn’s continuation in full confidence that there will be no let-down in storytelling sweep and spectacle. Because of the pressure of momentous events and the lessened need for expository character delineation, the dialogue this time around tends toward the utilitarian and declamatory; with hardly an alteration, the very same words, given a different spin by the likes of John Cleese or Michael Palin, could be quite funny. But the grim mood established by the clouds of war and the muted blues, greens, grays and earth tones of Andrew Lesnie’s grand but mobile cinematography keep the proceedings sober as King Theoden and his people abandon their homes for the presumed safety of a mighty fortress, Helm’s Deep. After a haunting march across the Dead Marshes, beautifully realized by production designer Grant Major and his team, Frodo, Sam and Gollum are captured by Gondor leader Faramir (David Wenham), which effectively sidelines them for most of the remainder of the picture. Over in the forest, the dawdling Treebeard eventually calls a conference of his branchy brethren; when the ambulatory ancient trees at the last minute decide to take action, it’s quite a sight to see. But the final half-hour is largely and rightly given over to the battle at Helm’s Deep, an event that never could have been presented as vividly or on such a scale in the pre-CGI era. Jackson stages the logistics with admirable clarity; Saruman’s Uruk-hai soldiers, ferocious hulks that are half-men, half-monsters, gather in such numbers on the plains that death seems certain for everyone inside the heavy stone fort. Heroics abound on the parts of Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli, with the latter’s bemused reactions in the face of repeated endangerment a continued source of humor. A promised deus ex machina arrives in the form of Gandalf, but while the battle may be won, the war against the occupants of the titular towers, Saruman and Sauron, remains to be pursued a year hence. Once again, Howard Shore’s vigorous score, seemingly somewhat altered and darkened, and sans the Enya contributions, provides valuable support. All the same, it’s hard to imagine a much better version of this material onscreen.

“The Fellowship of the Ring,” the first installment in Peter Jackson’s vigorous and faithful adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy, looks to please the book’s legions of fans with its imaginatively scrupulous rendering of the tome’s characters and worlds on the screen, as well as the uninitiated with its uninterrupted flow of incident and spectacle. Partially adapted for the screen once before by Ralph Bakshi in an unsuccessful 1978 animated version, Tolkien’s 1,000-page yarn poses all manner of challenges for a screen transfer — imaginative, logistical and financial. With the final bill likely to come in somewhere near $400 million when production and marketing costs are all tallied, one has to credit New Line Cinema with a tremendous amount of guts for shooting the moon for all three pictures with a young New Zealand director with only one genuinely notable, and small-scaled, film (“Heavenly Creatures”) to his credit. But Jackson must have convinced someone that he would do it right, a view thoroughly borne out by what’s up on the screen. Evocatively delineating the many aspects of Middle-Earth on tremendously diverse locations in New Zealand in resourceful collaboration with a massive crew, Jackson keeps a firm hand on the work’s central themes of good versus evil, rising to the occasion and group loyalty in the face of adversity, and always keeps things moving without getting bogged down in frills or effects for effects’ sake. Pic’s main problem, however, is inherent in the odyssey-like structure of the tale; the “and then, and then, and then” nature of the narrative becomes necessarily repetitive and even a bit wearisome at times, and ultimately arbitrary in the sense that one battle more or less with the Orcs, Ringwraiths or Uruk-Hai wouldn’t have made much difference. Lack of dramatic arcs involving rising action, relaxation and interconnecting story strands unfortunately makes the film’s running time feel pretty much like the three hours it is. It’s all about the ring, of course, the One Ring which, in a potent prologue that out-mummies “The Mummy” in terms of sweeping combat, is shown being forged by the malevolent Sauron as a source of dark power, being lost in battle and finally disappearing for 3,000 years until it’s retrieved by an unlikely Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins (Ian Holm). Perfectly mirroring the opening chapters of the book as if to reassure the faithful millions that its intentions are honorable, film depicts old Bilbo being urged by his old friend, the wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen), to leave the ring behind for his adopted nephew Frodo (Elijah Wood), who has now come of age but knows nothing of the ring, its legacy or power. Early stretches are obliged to pack in a great deal of exposition, but screenwriters Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Jackson make it go down easily by mixing in agreeable doses of action and character work. Bilbo takes off but Gandalf keeps turning up whenever he’s needed to mentor the reluctant Ringbearer, who, with his best friend Sam (Sean Astin) and mirthsome buddies Merry (Dominic Monaghan) and Pippin (Billy Boyd), set out from the Shire with one purpose: to return the ring to Mount Doom in dreaded Mordor, where it was created and the only place it can be destroyed, so as to save civilization from the full force of evil that would be unleashed should it fall back into the wrong hands. Much, of course, stands in their way. For starters, the ring itself “wants” to be returned to evildoers who can fulfill its potential, forces now represented by turncoat wizard Saruman (Christopher Lee), who gathers an army of fearsome fighting monsters in order to capture the gold. There are also relentless Dark Riders, marauding swordsmen, natural catastrophes and airborne spies, which give Saruman a clear picture of where they are. After innumerable confrontations, fights and close shaves — most cinematically notable an exciting chase in which Arwen, with an injured Frodo onboard, outflanks a posse of Dark Riders — “Fellowship” has its first climax in the Mines of Moria, a corpse-strewn complex of caves and vaulting chambers where the valiant band is attacked by ghastly Orcs, including one giant ogre who looks like the illegitimate brother of a supporting player in “Harry Potter.” Once the group has made its daring escape, it is attacked again in a forest, from which Frodo must flee before setting out for Mordor and the sequel, “The Two Towers.” The film also very well handles the matter of perspective and height differentiation between the Hobbits and Dwarfs. While he has perhaps not written a classic epic adventure score in the manner of Korngold, Rozsa or Steiner, Howard Shore has composed two hours of music that is constantly supportive, creative and complementary to the action. As such, it represents an object lesson that handily points up how unnecessarily intrusive and insufferably distracting John Williams’ work is in “Harry Potter.”

An animated combo of the old Bob Hope--Bing Crosby "Road" pictures and "The Man Who Would Be King," DreamWorks' third major feature cartoon, "The Road to El Dorado," is a strained and pallid concoction that won't fire the collective imaginations of modern children. Five years in production, epic buddy picture went through two sets of directors and numerous evolving concepts, arriving finally at a middle ground between outright romp and a serious take on the arrival of the conquistadors in the New World. Subject matter is rife with possibilities, even for a moppet-oriented effort that obviously isn’t going to grapple with such heavy themes as conquest and subjugation. “Pocahontas” showed that it is possible to tread this sensitive terrain with a degree of balance and sensitivity in terms that kids can grasp. But whenever “El Dorado” threatens to get serious, it backs off, retreating into loud shenanigans between its two mischievous heroes, complete with annoyingly anachronistic mannerisms such as high-fiving and shouts of “Yes!”; vampy scheming on the part of its heroine, who looks and sounds like a Las Vegas tart; rambunctious action sequences and montage-oriented musical numbers that tend to center on general concepts (“The Trail We Blaze,” “It’s Tough to Be a God”) rather than on immediate emotions. First quarter-hour introduces dark-haired Tulio (voiced by Kevin Kline) and blond-maned Miguel (Kenneth Branagh) as Spanish rascals who delight in creating **** and extricating themselves with devilish aplomb. After one prank too many, however, they find themselves trapped in barrels and placed aboard one of Cortes’ ships headed across the Atlantic in 1519. With Cortes’ noble horse, they escape in a lifeboat and finally wash up on a beautiful beach bordered by jungle. Quickly captured by imposing bronze-skinned natives, the boys think their goose is cooked upon arrival at the fabled city of gold, El Dorado. But the coming of such “gods,” as they are perceived to be, has been prophesied, and, after a bit of lucky shuffling and hocus-pocus, Tulio and Miguel are installed in exclusive quarters atop one of the city’s many pyramids. Local babe Chel (Rosie Perez) is on to their game and blackmails the flummoxed pair into including her in their plan to escape El Dorado with a bounty of gold, courtesy of a large boat to be built especially for them. Although there is a local chief (Edward James Olmos), he, along with the rest of the community, is dominated by high priest Tzekel-Kan (Armand Assante), a commanding figure who pays elaborate homage to the white strangers at first but gradually becomes skeptical of their presumed divinity. The severe holy man is especially offended by the newcomers’ oh-so-sensitive objections to human sacrifice, first when they prevent an execution, and later after the “gods” manage to win a furious ball game and then insist that the losers, contrary to custom, be spared. In a direct lift from the film “The Man Who Would Be King,” Tzekel-Kan realizes that the visitors are just human beings after all when Miguel bleeds from a cut. Far too much time is devoted to the two charlatans’ silly arguments about if and how they’re going to pull off their charade, and to contretemps concerning Chel, whom they declare to be off-limits romantically but who manages to come between them nevertheless. By contrast, one of the script’s more promising elements — Miguel’s sudden surge of feeling for the local citizens and their gentle lifestyle when he mingles with them, to the consternation of his anxious partner — is given unduly short shrift. Even if “the allure of the primitive” reps a cliche in the adventure/exploration genre, a bit more time devoted to it would have brought the setting and its inhabitants more to the foreground; as it is, there is no individuation among the native people. Kline and Branagh (last paired in “Wild Wild West”) give boisterous, spirited readings to their characters, even if Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio’s script provides them with few shadings or interesting traits. Assante registers strongly as the powerful priest. But the Chel character is so contemporary, and in a vulgar way to boot, as to be incredible and off-putting, and Perez’s urbanite voicing doesn’t help. Even Chel’s motivation is unbelievable: El Dorado is presented as a Shangri-La–like paradise, and no one in this sealed-off city would even know about another place to which he or she would want to flee. Visual design as overseen by directors Eric “Bibo” Bergeron and Don Paul is colorful, sometimes attractive but never breathtaking. Animation, compositions and editing favor dramatic angles and fluidly changing perspectives that keep things interesting, while the characters are more commonly conceived; a few elements, notably the gold, are rendered with near-photographic realism. The animals on view comprehendingly participate in human endeavors but aren’t anthropomorphized in traditional Disney fashion

A bravura tribute to the spirit of “Point Blank” and the importance of short-term memory, “Memento” deconstructs time and space with Einstein-caliber dexterity in the service of a delectably disturbing tale of revenge. British-born scripter-helmer Christopher Nolan avoids the sophomore slump with flying colors while deepening some of the themes so craftily explored in his debut effort, “Following.” Pic’s aggressively nonlinear structure and subtle accretion of clues suggest a second viewing may yield additional rewards, although it’s all there the first time around for attentive auds. Opening credits show a hand holding a Polaroid photo of a bloodied dead man lying face down on concrete. The photo “un-develops” — indicating the scene is being shown in reverse. It’s a crucial image as well as an apt intro to a story told via constant episodes of backtracking and partial repetition, all meticulously layered to approximate the waking nightmare and endless conundrum of Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce, with bleached blond hair and an American accent). If ever there was an unreliable narrator, Leonard is it. He can recall everything that happened in his life until the night of the assault that left his wife dead and him with brain damage from being hit over the head. Since then, he hasn’t been able to make a memory “stick.” Thanks to his condition, Leonard is simultaneously miserable and serene. He has to write himself notes about everything, with the most crucial reminders concerning his mission — such as “John G. **** and murdered your wife” — tattooed on his skin. Unable to remember anyone he’s met post-assault, no matter how many times they’ve interacted, Leonard takes Polaroids of everyone he meets and jots captions on them such as “She will help you out of pity” (in reference to a barmaid, played by Carrie-Anne Moss) or “Don’t believe his lies” (in reference to an alleged friend, played by Joe Pantoliano). Leonard’s curse is that even if he does get revenge, he won’t remember it a few minutes later. His condition also puts a fresh, frequently comical, twist on elements as basic as a chase scene: Leonard is running, but he can’t recall whether he’s doing the chasing or is being chased. Terrific idea and ingenious execution may wear thin or grow irritating for viewers unaccustomed to paying close attention. But anybody who dug the trippy triptych structure of “Pulp Fiction” should be able to keep up with the temporal shifts as narrative moves back, forward and sometimes sideways with the alacrity of a crab scuttling across the widescreen. Dody Dorn’s editing is top-notch as pic — scripted, acted and lensed with precision — smoothly toggles back and forth between sequences in B&W and in color. Pearce is superb, Moss and Pantoliano are vital sounding boards for Leonard’s quest and Mark Boone Jr. is a hoot as the motel desk clerk who rents Leonard two rooms on the theory he won’t recall having paid for either one. Stephen Tobolowsky is poignant as another victim of short-term memory loss whose sad evolution haunts Leonard. L.A.-set pic has an impressive noir-in-the-sunshine feel, built of cars, bars, motels and isolated hideaways. The ambient rumble of the unsettling, ominous score contributes enormously to the discomfiting mood.

The Graduate is a delightful, satirical comedy-drama about a young man's seduction by an older woman, and the measure of maturity which he attains from the experience. Anne Bancroft, Katharine Ross and relative newcomer Dustin Hoffman head a very competent cast. An excellent screenplay by Calder Willingham and comedy specialist Buck Henry, based on the Charles Webb novel, focuses on Hoffman, just out of college and wondering what it’s all about. Predatory Miss Bancroft, wife of Murray Hamilton, introduces Hoffman to mechanical sex, reaction to which evolves into true love with Miss Ross, Miss Bancroft’s daughter. Had the story been told in terms of straight drama, it would have been one of those boring modern mellers — the hippie equivalent of a woman’s pic — in which vacant stares are supposed to convey emotion and plot action, and jazzed up cinematics become obvious and pretentious. To be sure, Nichols, in his second feature film, has laid on, with a trowel, most of the current gimmicks, but, thanks to a strong script, they are not noticeable for most of the film. In the 70 minutes which elapse from Hoffman’s arrival home from school to the realization by Miss Ross that he has had an affair with her mother, pic is loaded with hilarious comedy and, because of this, the intended commentary on materialistic society is most effective. Only in retrospect does one realize a basic, but not overly damaging, flaw: Hoffman’s achievements in school are not credible in light of his basic shyness. No matter, or not much, anyway. Miss Bancroft, feline and slinky in a manner very much like Lauren Bacall, is excellent, as is Miss Ross, an exciting, fresh actress from the Universal stable, who has a long career ahead of her. Hoffman is perfect in his role. William Daniels and Elizabeth Wilson play his parents in top fashion. Small, but well-cast, supporting contingent includes co-scripter Henry, as a room clerk. Only in the final 35 minutes, as Hoffman drives up and down the LA-Frisco route in pursuit of Miss Ross, does film falter in pacing, result of which the switched-on cinematics become obvious, and therefore tiring. Vet cameraman Robert Surtees used Panavision and Technicolor to desired advantage. It would be wrong to say that Surtees has “turned on” to new techniques; more precisely, and more importantly, he is responsive to the desire for a modern look. In other words, he is a professional craftsman. Richard Sylbert’s production design is outstanding, again. Paul Simon wrote the good songs, sung by Simon & Garfunkel, and Dave Grusin’s incidental music is equally adroit. Sam O’Steen’s editing is sharp, and other technical credits are strong. Count this one a winner for Joseph E. Levine, Turman and Nichols Murf.

Die Hard is as high tech, rock hard and souped up as an action film can be, a suspenser [based on the novel Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorp] pitting a lone wolf cop against a group of terrorists that has taken over a highrise office tower. Bruce Willis plays John McClane, an overworked New York policeman who flies into Los Angeles at Christmas to visit his two daughters and estranged wife Holly (Bonnie Bedelia). Planning a rather different holiday agenda are the terrorists led by Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman). The **** dozen invade the plush 30th floor offices of Nakatomi Corp during its Christmas party, and hold the employees hostage as a computer whiz cracks a code that will put the mainly German bad boys in possession of $600 million in negotiable bonds. Slipping out of the party in the nick of time with nothing but his handgun, Willis is the fly in the ointment of the criminals’ plans, picking off one, then two more of the scouts sent on pest control missions. Beefed up considerably for his role, Willis is amiable enough in the opening stretch, but overdoes the grimacing and heavy emoting later on. The cooler and more humorous he is the better. Rickman has a giddy good time but sometimes goes over the top as the henchman.

The listless movie adaptation of "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" has the sweat stains of wasted energy; it's dreary, yet frantic. The film is inspired by Alan Moore's comics of the same name, an imaginative and grisly take on Victorian heroes. Convened to battle a world-threatening evil, the league is a group of tough, forgotten or ignored British loners brought together at the behest of the queen to stop this encroaching danger. In the director Stephen Norrington's film, it's a plot engineered by a villain known as the Fantom to sink Venice, and, yes, eventually conquer the world. To foil this plot, the British Secret Service agent Sanderson Reed (Tom Goodman-Hill), working under the auspices of the agency head M (Richard Roxburgh), is determined to bring the league of misfit adventurers together. The first summoned is Allan Quatermain (Sean Connery), the legendary hunter and explorer who, though well past his prime, is still capable of some world-beating moves himself. Quatermain serves as president of these immortals, a number that eventually includes the pirate Captain Nemo (Neseeruddin Shah) and an invisible man, Rodney Skinner (Tony Curran, using his voice wickedly well). As the plot thickens, others link up, like Mina Harker (Peta Wilson), a victim of Dracula who now uses **** prowess for good. She helps, um, seduce to the cause the dandyish Dorian Gray (Stuart Townsend), whose portrait makes him invulnerable in addition to being impervious to aging — a witty turn that Oscar Wilde apparently had no interest in. The noble, rambunctious and innocent Tom Sawyer (Shane West), now an adult operative for the United States Secret Service, tosses his Stetson in. Eventually the league tracks down its final inductee, Mr. Hyde (Jason Flemyng), who stalks the streets of Paris after fleeing London. Wearing him down until he becomes the docile Dr. Jekyll, the league members browbeat him into joining. Aboard Captain Nemo's magnificent blade of a submarine, the Nautilus, the team sets out on its mission to find the Fantom and end his perfidy. Between bouts of bickering and possible treachery, the league must try to combat the Fantom's futuristic inventions — like tanks and flame-throwers — with valor, daring and some of Nemo's own engineering marvels. The film's screenplay by James Dale Robinson — who toiled in comic books for some time himself — takes pains to get the spirit of Mr. Moore's tale right. It's a formidable task, bringing the comics' dank, coruscating vision to the screen — an abiding interest of the producer Don Murphy. Mr. Murphy was also responsible for a previous Moore adaptation, "From Hell" featuring another Victorian misfit, Jack the Ripper. Mr. Moore's melancholic and apocalyptic stories have a dour, murderous humor drizzling through the depressive clouds. No one in comics is his equal at conjuring the end of the world, and in his stories — from "The Watchmen" and "V for Vendetta" through "League" — the world is awash in brutality and ugliness, deserving of doom. Mr. Moore's pleasure comes in serving up Old Testament balance. The league of his comics falls into two piles. One group consists of victims, like the haunted, doddering Quatermain, who battles an opium habit and fears that he's too old to do much good, and Mina, whose past with vampires is only alluded to (and who leads the group with her cool British common sense and an implied death wish stemming from her reputation as a fallen woman). Or else, they're sly, amoral psychopaths, like the invisible man, who's introduced **** young women at a girls' school, and Hyde, a calculating man-beast who remembers every slight done to him or his alter ego. The vengeance he finally takes on the invisible man is horrific, a fate that will never make it from the page to the screen. No one is going to follow that story to the letter in making a big-budget action movie. But Mr. Moore's "League" is a meditation on ambiguity, something large-scale-action spectacles have shied away from since "The Empire Strikes Back" which came so long ago it now actually feels like a legend from Victorian England. Despite the intentions to be reverent, Mr. Norrington, who did a ruthlessly elegant job directing "Blade" is bound and gagged by the need of "League" to be quick and glib. Somehow, you sense that Fox would be happier calling this picture "The Justice League of Extraordinary Gentlemen." As it stands, the movie is neither gentle nor extraordinary. "El-Sada El-Rigal" may be a better movie than other Connery fantasy-action films like "The Avengers" but then again a glass of muddy water looks good to someone just coming in from the desert.

Ridley Scott adapts Andy Weir's sci-fi novel about an astronaut, played by Matt Damon, left stranded and struggling to survive on Mars. Ridley Scott goes back to the future, a familiar destination for him, and returns in fine shape in The Martian. Although technically science fiction by virtue of its being largely set on a neighboring planet, this smartly made adaptation of Andy Weir’s best-selling novel is more realistic in its attention to detail than many films set in the present, giving the story the feel of an adventure that could happen the day after tomorrow. Constantly absorbing rather than outright exciting, this major autumn Fox release should generate muscular business worldwide. Scott has famously been up in space before, thrillingly in Alien, far less so in Prometheus (a sequel to which he is currently preparing). This time, he’s telling a survival story, pure and simple, of an American astronaut, thought to be dead, who’s left behind on Mars when an enormous storm compels his five fellow crew members to hastily cut short their extra-planetary visit. It’s Robinson Crusoe on Mars, but without the monkey and aliens. When Mark Watney (Matt Damon) regains consciousness after having been impaled by an errant antenna and knocked out, he quickly assesses the situation: He’s millions of miles from home and, based on the food supply, concludes that he’s got a month to live. But he’s by nature a can-do, optimistic kind of guy, a botanist by profession possessed of a sardonic, self-deprecating sense of humor, and decides that he has no intention of dying, even though the next Mars mission from home isn’t due to arrive for another four years. Most of the early-going is devoted to the man making calculations as to how he can maximize his time on the arid planet, beginning by growing more potatoes from the ones he’s got (in part by using his own homemade manure). Living in the relatively spacious quarters he and his colleagues set up, Mark cannibalizes everything he can, carefully apportions his rations and settles in for the long term; at moments the biggest threat to his sanity is the exclusive collection of ‘70s disco music left behind by one of his former astronauts. The claustrophobia and solitariness of Mark’s situation is shortly broken up by events back on Earth. After Mark’s tragedy has been duly mourned by the public, a sharp-eyed NASA technician notices ground movement in her surveillance of the Martian surface that could only be Mark moving around. Communication is duly re-established, which ignites both elation at his survival and frantic assessments of what it would take, and cost, to launch a rescue mission. Weir’s book is heavy with technical assessments of food and oxygen supplies, mechanical capabilities, flight duration and the physics of inter-planetary travel. Screenwriter Drew Goddard (World War Z, Cloverfield) has respected all these details while whittling them down to manageable and comprehensible levels. Officials at NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (represented by a lively and individualistic cast including Jeff Daniels, Kristen Wiig, Sean Bean, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Mackenzie Davis and Donald Glover) do everything they can to develop a feasible rescue plan and are ultimately helped out by a surprising foreign partner. But ultimately it comes down to the willingness of Mark’s astronaut colleagues (Jessica Chastain, Michael Pena, Kate Mara, Sebastian Stan, Aksel Hennie) to place themselves at great risk by attempting a long-shot rescue attempt, a decision that raises the provocative moral dilemma of whether it’s correct to put five lives at great risk for the remote reward of saving one life. Scott does generate a degree of suspense in this climactic stretch, but the film’s overall tone is dominated by the characters’ collegial humor, mutual respect among professionals and smart people being tested by an unprecedented challenge. The director and screenwriter downplay the conventional melodrama inherent in the situation in favor of emphasizing how practical problems should be addressed with rational responses rather than hysteria, knee-jerk patriotism or selfish expedience. Cinematographer Dariusz Wolski turns the neat trick of providing the film with a fundamental documentary reality while also making a thing of great beauty. Extra attentiveness is amply on display in all creative departments. Ridley's back in (a good) space.

Jack O'Connell plays Olympic athlete and American war hero Louis Zamperini in Angelina Jolie's well-mounted but underwhelming WWII drama. With a major awards push for Jolie and her topnotch collaborators — d.p. Roger Deakins, composer Alexandre Desplat and editors Tim Squyres and William Goldenberg not least among them — Universal should be able to court a sizable worldwide audience for this capably stirring, morally unambiguous and classically polished prestige picture about an unusually spirited member of the Greatest Generation who survived a hell beyond anyone’s imagination. (Zamperini died in July at the age of 97, due to complications from pneumonia.) After languishing in development for decades, the project finally took viable shape with the 2010 publication of Hillenbrand’s book, adapted here by the unlikely team of the Coen brothers (in their third scripting-for-hire gig, after 2012’s “Gambit” and 1985’s “Crimewave”), Richard LaGravenese and William Nicholson. Regardless of their individual contributions, none of the credited writers faced an easy or enviable task in fashioning a feature-length narrative out of their exhaustively researched source material (for which Hillenbrand interviewed Zamperini 75 times over the course of eight years). In runners’ parlance, “Unbroken” feels like a good, steady 10k where a marathon was arguably called for: For all its scenes of intense deprivation and extreme brutality, the film never quite manages, over the course of 137 carefully measured minutes, to reproduce the feeling of a sustained endurance test. Nor does it succeed in dramatizing the human need for faith and forgiveness, one of its more baldly stated themes, in more than perfunctory, platitudinous terms. Of course, to expect any movie to place the viewer directly into Zamperini’s spiked cleats, or even begin to approximate the depth and horror of his wartime experiences, would hold it to an impossible standard. Yet the bar is set unreasonably high from the moment “Unbroken” introduces itself as “a true story,” a presumptuous choice of words (the “based on” qualifier is conspicuously absent) that the script never fully earns as it guides us through a series of conventional, connect-the-dots flashbacks. An exciting aerial-combat prologue finds O’Connell’s Louis — or Louie, as he was more commonly known — flying a rickety B-24 bomber over the Pacific, where he and his comrades drop their payload on Japanese bases, shoot down Zero planes and take plenty of fire in return. Bobbing along in two life rafts with dwindling rations, fending off attacks by neighboring sharks and Japanese bombers (at one point simultaneously), the three men will last more than a month before Mac succumbs, leaving Phil and Louie to drift, sun-scorched and emaciated, for another 15 days or so. Yet the film’s attempts to convey the slow, arduous passage of time feel rushed and noncommittal, effectively cherry-picking the book’s more memorable nautical setpieces and adding a few temporal markers (“Day 18,” etc.), quick visual dissolves and the stately swells of Desplat’s score. Following a recent wave of intensely immersive survival stories (“All Is Lost” makes a particularly instructive comparison), “Unbroken’s” streamlined, checklist-style approach seems all the more rote and obligatory. Any dramatic account of real-life events must of course filter and condense, yet several omissions in “Unbroken” are especially telling: We’re denied any real sense of the young Louie’s insatiable appetite for mischief; nor do we see him and his comrades conversing in secret code, or paying hilariously flatulent tribute to Japan’s Emperor Hirohito, or conceiving a desperate plot to murder Watanabe — or, barring that, inducing a crippling bout of diarrhea that puts the miserable sergeant out of commission for more than a week. Jolie previously examined the dehumanization of war in her little-seen 2011 directing debut, “In the Land of Blood and Honey,” a muddled but provocative drama set in 1990s Bosnia-Herzegovina. “Unbroken” serves up a similarly relentless catalog of wartime woes — filthy conditions, crippling thirst and hunger, back-breaking labor, nonstop verbal and physical abuse, nasty injuries, ritualized humiliations, and the hopeless knowledge that an Allied victory will only bring about the prisoners’ execution. Yet there’s something unmistakably soft-edged, if not sanitized, about these PG-13 horrors, the accrual of which produces a curious sort of paradox by film’s end: What we’ve seen is at once plenty grueling and nowhere near grueling enough, on the basis of what Zamperini really went through. (“Where’re the maggots? Where’s the dysentery?” my screening companion whispered over the closing credits, unsatisfied by a relatively tasteful scene of Louie and his fellow inmates disposing of their presumably disease-ridden excrement.)

"Taxi Driver" a sometimes-elliptical masterpiece about the bloody redemption of an alienated New York cabbie, has been rereleased to mark its 20th anniversary. But it hasn't aged so much as triumphantly metastasized. Since the mid-1970s, the movie has become presciently emblematic of our emotionally diseased, violence-prone culture. Central character Travis Bickle's semi-psychotic, solo routine in front of the mirror You talkin' to me?" has been performed as a gag at keg parties, around lunch tables, in standup routines, via e-mail and certainly in front of mirrors across the world for nearly 20 years. More tragically, John W. Hinckley Jr.'s bizarre infatuation with Jodie Foster who plays the object of a similar obsession in "Taxi Driver" caused him to gun down President Reagan in 1981. Hinckley's statement that he wanted to impress the actress, the assassination attempt's bloody denouement (four men were struck down in all) and Hinckley's media infamy echo chillingly the scenario in "Taxi Driver." Paul Schrader's script, in fact, was partly inspired by the diaries of Arthur Bremer, the man who shot George Wallace. And the 1976 movie's theme of bomb-ticking loneliness and, by extension, the notion that we are a nation of angry strangers who vent paranoid resentment toward public figures or the government, couldn't be more resonant today. "Taxi Driver" also happens to be a great movie, one of the few relatively recent films (like "The Godfather") to join the pantheon of popular classics and great American cinema. The story is about Vietnam veteran and loner Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), who takes a job as a cabdriver in New York City. He is drawn to and disgusted by the 42nd Street and Times Square world of weirdos, hookers and pornographic theaters. Every night, he transports lost souls from place to place in this Hades-like zone, while he fumes with fascination, disgust and unbearable solitude. His frustrated life takes a decisive turn when he meets and fixes on two women, two beacons of hope that he steers toward. One is icy uptown girl Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), who works for a presidential candidate, the other is Iris (Foster), a 12-year-old prostitute in bondage to her pimp, Sport (Harvey Keitel). When things don't turn out well with Betsy, Travis takes a course of action that changes everyone's lives forever. Although "Taxi Driver" has been available on video for years, here is a brief opportunity to savor it the way it's meant to be seen: on the big screen. Schrader's provocative screenplay, Martin Scorsese's vivid, fluid direction, Bernard Herrmann's sensual, velvety score (which you will hear in Dolby for the first time) and De Niro's landmark performance will come to life again, 20 years later, and this trip to the flicks will be more than worth your while.

"You trying to tell me the F.B.I.'s going to pay me to learn to surf?" Yes, dude, that's exactly what his superiors are trying to tell Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves), a clean-cut rookie officer with a secret flair for being bodacious. In "Point Break," Johnny happens to be available when a gang of bank robbers leaves behind a surfboard-wax sample (in a footprint), some beach-related toxins (in a strand of hair) and photographic evidence of a tan line (in a surveillance camera shot of one masked robber delivering a kind of humorous message by dropping his pants). Hey, heavy evidence. This turns out to be one of those beach bum-cosmic high armed robberies with which Southern California F.B.I. agents are no doubt constantly plagued. And Johnny turns out to be the perfect candidate for the job of surfing detective. He looks good in a wet suit. He figures out how to extract information from a nice-looking female surf expert (Lori Petty). Pretty soon he is showing up at the office saying things like "Caught my first tube this morning, sir." He totes his surfboard with him to prove the point. "Catch a wave and you're sitting on top of the world," as the Beach Boys put it in more innocent times. But the surf culture represented in "Point Break" is much more far-reaching and diffuse, in the manner of something left out too long in the sun. It is principally embodied by Bodhi (Patrick Swayze), which is short for Bodhisattva, which is Sanskrit for "being of wisdom" and therefore of no relevance here. Bodhi, who has a cult following among the kind of people who like to re-enact their finest surfing moments at parties, speaks a fluid line of Zen wavethink as he encourages acolytes to accept the water's energy and observes, "It's not tragic to die doing what you love." Among the things Bodhi loves are skydiving, extra-risky surfing and possibly even chancier pursuits. Just as she did in "Blue Steel," the director Kathryn Bigelow observes the peculiar complicity that develops between a law officer and a seductive criminal. And once again Ms. Bigelow moves so fast and so far with this idea that her film (with a screenplay by W. Peter Iliff) eventually spins out of control. But "Point Break," though it's anything but watertight where plotting is concerned, again reveals Ms. Bigelow's real talents as a director of fast-paced, high-adrenaline action. Whenever the flakiness of "Point Break" threatens to become lulling, Ms. Bigelow wakes up her audience with a formidable jolt. Among the film's especially energetic sequences are a furious two-man chase on foot through a heavily populated neighborhood, shot vigorously with a hand-held camera; sustained and amazing sky-diving scenes guaranteed to make the palms sweat, and a police raid on a house that becomes a wild melee and turns a lawnmower into a potentially deadly weapon. This last episode, and others like it, prove definitively that testosterone-crazed movie violence is by no means the sole province of male directors. Ms. Bigelow also gives many of the film's conversational scenes a crisp, punchy momentum and a lot of energy. A lot of the snap comes, surprisingly, from Mr. Reeves, who displays considerable discipline and range. He moves easily between the buttoned-down demeanor that suits a police procedural story and the loose-jointed manner of his comic roles. Especially fiery and scene-stealing is Gary Busey, as the gruff Nick Nolte-style wild man who is Johnny's F.B.I. partner and foil. Mr. Swayze, more tranquil, is best when showing off his proficiency for glamorous athletics and least good when taking the screenplay seriously. When another character says, of Mr. Swayze's Bodhi, "He's got this gift for blankness," the thought seems all too true. Mr. Iliff's screenplay includes some egregious silliness and a long string of false endings, but occasionally it sounds the kind of tough-guy note that gets one's attention. "It's been paper targets up till today, huh?" says the more experienced F.B.I. man (Mr. Busey) to the rookie (Mr. Reeves) after the latter's first kill. "It's no different, Johnny. Just a little more to clean up."

“Shrek” is an instant animated classic. Rudely sending up even the most beloved fairy tale traditions while at the same time effectively embodying them, this spirited and often very funny lark accomplishes something that most films in the bygone Hollywood studio era used to do but is remarkably rare in today’s world of niche markets: It offers entertainment equally to viewers from 4 to 104. Playing equally effectively as a lively romp for kids and an enormously clever comedy for adults, “Shrek” is both simple and sophisticated, hip without being smug or condescending. It’s also a film for animation fans to cherish as well as one that non-enthusiasts can enjoy. On May 12, pic will become just the fifth animated film to be shown in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, after the late ’40s-early ’50s Disney features “Make Mine Music,” “Dumbo” and “Peter Pan,” and the 1973 French production “La Planete Sauvage” (Fantastic Planet). Shaking the narrative and stylistic cobwebs from the form, standing every fairy tale convention on its head and landing some excellent shots at Disney for good measure, the picture scores on every front: The writing is smart, the vocal performances are game, and the relatively lifelike look is stunningly realized, making for the best-looking computer animated feature to date. Screenplay by the team of Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio (“Aladdin,” “The Mark of Zorro”), Joe Stillman (“Beavis & Butt-head Do America”) and Roger S.H. Schulman (“Balto”) is based on a short 1990 illustrated children’s book by William Steig that chronicled in very simple terms a horrible ogre’s journey to a castle where he wins the hand of an equally ugly princess. There was nothing more to it than that, so it’s a conservative estimate to venture that at least 95% of the inspiration for what’s onscreen came from the scriptwriters, who have let their imaginations go in coming up with characters, subplots, relationships, gags, intrigues and flights of fancy that have no seeds in the book. Fine jokes and reversals of expectations fill the journey homeward, where the film most clearly reveals its charming small debts to such timeless classics as “Don Quixote,” “The Wizard of Oz” and “Beauty and the Beast,” among others. One of the funniest bits has Princess Fiona singing a Disney-style duet with a bluebird, until the chirping creature suddenly explodes when Fiona hits a piercing high note. Only false note in the entire picture comes when Fiona, accosted by a strangely French-accented “Monsieur” Robin Hood, makes some “Matrix”/”Crouching Tiger”-type martial arts moves; bit feels like a sop to tastes of the moment and is the element that will first appear to date the film in years to come. Visually, “Shrek” is a constant dazzlement, the images all but leaping off the screen. Against the brilliantly designed, exceptionally vivid backgrounds, the characters, human and animal alike, appear realistic and highly expressive without being photographically so; the fine line between naturalism and stylization has been unerringly walked by the large team working under first-time directors Andrew Adamson (a veteran visual effects supervisor) and Vicky Jenson (an art director and storyboard artist). Endowing Shrek with a mild Irish brogue, Myers brings abundant drollery and vocal appeal to the physically repugnant title character, which implicitly lends weight to the underlying theme of beauty coming from the inside. Much as he did in his previous animated outing as Mushu the Dragon in “Mulan,” Murphy provides Donkey with a jive-talking motor mouth; some of his riffs are genuinely amusing, but the routine threatens to become a bit much at times. Diaz’s readings are energetic and willful, making Fiona a medieval “Charlie’s Angels” candidate, and Lithgow makes the vertically shortchanged Farquaad imposing without undue melodrama. Outstanding score by Harry Gregson-Williams and John Powell (“Antz,” “Chicken Run”) is abetted by a collection of eclectic, shrewdly chosen pop tunes all used to lively effect.

The imposing shadow of Hitchcock looms large over Robert Zemeckis' "What Lies Beneath," a thriller that tries aggressively, but not entirely successfully, to deliver the goods of three genres -- suspense, supernatural and horror -- for the price of one movie. Revisiting the turf of stylish thrillers, in which an upscale yuppie couple is haunted by mistakes of the past, story centers on a genius researcher and his loving wife, played by Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer, whose seemingly happy marriage and stable life are utterly shaken by mysterious events that spiral out of control. Intermittently scary but not fully absorbing, this DreamWorks-Fox co-production should grab strong opening numbers due to shrewd marketing that positions pic as an adult thriller. Top flight talent on both sides of the camera can’t quite disguise the B-quality of Clark Gregg’s script, a patchwork composed of bits and pieces from Hitchcock’s suspensers, the Gothic “haunted house” tradition, “Fatal Attraction”-like cheap thrill sensations, creepy supernatural mysteries like “The Sixth Sense” and so on. “What Lies Beneath” won’t restore Ford or Pfeiffer to pre-eminence. On the one hand, the old-fashioned material is inferior to their talents, while on the other, it’s not spooky or stylish enough to become a must-see for the goodtimes-hungry summer masses.First act is an unabashed reworking of “Rear Window” with a gender reversal. Norman and Claire Spencer (Ford and Pfeiffer) move to a picturesque house near a Vermont lake after sending their daughter to college. As soon as they settle down, Claire begins to suspect that there’s something wrong with their neighbors, Warren and Mary Feur (James Remar and Miranda Otto). Behind a fence that divides the two estates, she hears vocal arguments, then painful cries. Like Jimmy Stewart in Hitchcock’s classic, she’s glued to her window with spectacles, soon beginning to fear that Warren has murdered his wife. Norman, who’s totally consumed with his research project and upcoming conference, dismisses her reports. Top flight talent on both sides of the camera can’t quite disguise the B-quality of Clark Gregg’s script, a patchwork composed of bits and pieces from Hitchcock’s suspensers, the Gothic “haunted house” tradition, “Fatal Attraction”-like cheap thrill sensations, creepy supernatural mysteries like “The Sixth Sense” and so on. “What Lies Beneath” won’t restore Ford or Pfeiffer to pre-eminence. On the one hand, the old-fashioned material is inferior to their talents, while on the other, it’s not spooky or stylish enough to become a must-see for the goodtimes-hungry summer masses.First act is an unabashed reworking of “Rear Window” with a gender reversal. Norman and Claire Spencer (Ford and Pfeiffer) move to a picturesque house near a Vermont lake after sending their daughter to college. As soon as they settle down, Claire begins to suspect that there’s something wrong with their neighbors, Warren and Mary Feur (James Remar and Miranda Otto). In a problematic sequence that lacks much credibility, an angry Claire accuses Warren of murdering his wife at a public function attended by Norman’s notable peers, only to realize that his wife is there. The movie then drops the **** subplot — which proves to be a teaser — and turns into a supernatural mystery revolving around a lone woman in a haunted house. Some humor is integrated into the proceedings by the presence of Claire’s cynical divorcee friend, Jody (a splendid Diana Scarwid), in scenes in which the two discuss witchcraft and try to communicate with ghosts on a Ouija board. Changing gears again, third chapter centers on Claire’s discovery that her husband had an affair with a girl who is missing. Working as a private eye, she conducts an obsessive investigation to discover the girl’s whereabouts, including a visit to the girl’s distressed mother. Echoing motifs of Bernard Herrmann’s music for Hitchcock, Alan Silvetsri’s score contributes effectively to the menacing atmosphere. Tech credits are high grade, especially widescreen lensing by Zemeckis’ longtime collaborator Don Burgess, which keeps things fluid during the numerous house-bound scenes. There are notable trick shots within tight and confined spaces, good use of multiple mirrors that both reflect and distort Claire’s reality and long takes that allow the actors to develop a scene organically. Zemeckis, best known for combining storytelling skills and technical wizardry (“Back to the Future,” “Forrest Gump,” “Contact”), operates on a new turf, directing a thriller for the first time. All along, the feeling is that the filmmakers don’t trust the core material and try to compensate with a complicated storyline and overbaked production.

Part absurdist drama, part personal observational commentary and part hormonal explosion, Sam Mendes' third feature has numerous arresting moments but never achieves a confident, consistent or sufficiently audacious tone. As a Hollywood take on the United States’ initial offensive against the dictator commonly referred to here as Saddam Insane, “Jarhead” doesn’t come close to the first one, David O. Russell’s “Three Kings.” Nor does it self-importantly try to offer even covert commentary on what’s going on in Iraq today. Rather, Vietnam vet screenwriter William Broyles Jr. has used Anthony Swofford’s bestselling 2003 tome to create a bemused study of what it was like to be a soldier primed for action in a war in which ground troops were rendered almost irrelevant by air power. From the outset, Vietnam and movies assert themselves as the primary touchstones for “Jarhead.” You have to look carefully to make sure the opening shot isn’t drawn directly from “Full Metal Jacket,” what with a barracks-full of dogfaces being berated by a vein-busting drill instructor who looks like R. Lee Ermey’s country cousin. But it’s 1989, and the man/boys are being prepped for war on the sizzling sands of the Middle East. After 20 minutes of basic training, a beautifully rendered fleet of TWA 747s transports the tale to Saudi Arabia, where the men are exhorted to “kick some Iraqi ass” by a gung-ho officer (Chris Cooper). Throughout, global politics and the motives behind the troop buildup lie far in the background, as the film strives to portray a state of being rather than a reason for action. Once the stage shifts to the promised battleground, “Jarhead” becomes a vaguely existential story of being all dressed up with nowhere to go, about men awaiting chemical warfare and an alleged million-man army while playing football in the sand sporting gas masks, surreptitiously pleasuring themselves and giving each other grief about unfaithful girlfriends and wives. On a scene-by-scene basis, Mendes and Broyles provide a steady serving of gritty goods, from the lovely monologue by Jamie Foxx, playing a staff sergeant, to haunting shots of the men examining the charred remains of Iraqi soldiers and burning oil wells lighting up the night sky that prompt Swoff to observe that “the Earth is bleeding,” and for some will bring to mind Werner Herzog’s mesmerizing impressionistic docu “Lessons of Darkness.” After “American Beauty” and “Road to Perdition,” Mendes looks more than ever a veritable chameleon among directors as he stages the action here — and nonaction — with vigor and smarts. But his very caginess helps prevent the film from busting out — with irreverence, outrageousness, penetrating insight, anything — in a way that would give it a full-fledged personality of its own. It’s almost as if the filmmakers were hiding behind a mask of strongly cultivated intelligence that keeps them from genuinely expressing their emotions and gut instincts. Gyllenhaal is alert and physically very present in a good performance that centers the film, and Foxx is strong in his important secondary role. Otherwise, however, thesping is more ordinary than one has come to expect from a Mendes film. Ruggedly made pic looks buff and stripped down. Roger Deakins’ lensing is at one with the bleached-out appearance of the sand-colored costumes and settings (pic was shot entirely in North America, in the California and Mexican deserts). Visual effects are seamless, while Thomas Newman’s score is abetted by some musical selections that consciously ape those used in some Vietnam-era dramas.

When Alien was first released during the summer movie season of 1979, science fiction films were all the rage. The trend had been started two years earlier with the unexpected box office success of Star Wars, and, by 1979, anything even remotely connected with space and/or aliens was guaranteed to raise some interest. Two highly anticipated efforts - the big-screen debut of Star Trek (Star Trek: The Motion Picture) and the Star Wars sequel (The Empire Strikes Back) - both of which were within a year of their opening dates, further invigorated the atmosphere. It was into this climate that Alien was unleashed upon the general public. The film's memorable tag line, "In space, no one can hear you scream", promised a far different experience than the popcorn entertainment of Star Wars or the kinder, gentler saga of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In fact, Alien was as much horror as it was science fiction. In fact, one could make a convincing argument that there is more synergy between this picture and John Carpenter's Halloween than between Alien and any of the other umpteen sci-fi movies invading movie theaters at the time. Alien is about shocks and chills and thrills, not space battles. Where Star Wars has light sabers and blasters, Alien has intense atmosphere. In many ways, Alien was the first of a kind. True - it wasn't the first space movie to feature a homicidal monster, nor was it the first time a group of characters were hunted down one-by-one in dark, dank spaces. However, this "haunted house in space" film was one of the first to effectively cross-pollinate these two genres. Alien became the blueprint for dozens of rip-offs and three sequels. With one exception (James Cameron's superior Aliens, which substituted all-out action for creepy horror), none has come close to what the filmmakers attained with the 1979 feature. The director of Alien is British-born Ridley Scott, who was stepping behind the camera for only the second time (his feature debut was 1977's The Duellists). Along with 1982's Blade Runner, Alien cemented Scott as a filmmaker of great promise and ability. These days, whenever the director releases a new film, reviewers will inevitably mention Alien, Blade Runner, or both somewhere within the text of their write-up. In addition to blending graphic horror with science fiction, Alien has another distinction - it is one of the first films to feature a female action hero. Even today, on those rare occasions when a woman takes the lead in an action/adventure movie, she is typically measured up to Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley. In actuality, much of Ripley's reputation is based on events in Aliens, where she strikes back against the creatures with a vengeance. In Alien, Ripley is essentially just one of several crew members - until the end, when she's the last one standing (not counting Jones the cat). Having Ripley as the hero of Alien is an interesting twist. In 1979, viewers automatically expected that role to be filled by Tom Skerritt - not only because he had top billing, but because he is a man. Alien is a perfect example of a director gradually elevating the level of energy and anticipation in a motion picture. The way Scott meticulously raises the sense of menace and tension is worthy of Hitchcock. Like Steven Spielberg's great thriller Jaws, this atmosphere-soaked production relies on the viewer's imagination to enhance the alien's nightmarishness. Scott carefully restricts how much we see of the creature - there's enough to provide our minds with horrifying images, but not so much that the illusion is spoiled. Alien contains its fair share of genuine scares. These aren't mere "boo" moments, where something benign jumps out of the shadows accompanied by a loud noise and a musical crescendo, but legitimate shocks. The first occurs when the face-hugger leaps out of the egg and attaches itself to Kane. The second is when the alien explodes through Kane's chest. Then, during the hunt for the alien, there are numerous others. In fact, the level of suspense during the film's final 30 minutes becomes almost unbearable. What started as a seemingly low-key motion picture turns into a real white-knuckler. Despite not featuring any big names, the cast for Alien is comprised of credible actors, including two --Ian Holm and John Hurt - who have won numerous critical plaudits and earned Oscar nominations. Ironically, Sigourney Weaver, who would go on to be the most successful of the Alien stars, arguably gives the least impressive performance. Weaver is an uneven actress, with strengths in comedy and action, but weaknesses in drama. In its own way, Alien was as influential as Star Wars, proving that in the '70s/'80s wave of sci-fi, there was room for darker, grittier stories than the ones set a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

In his directorial debut, Kevin Costner brings a rare degree of grace and feeling to this elegiac tale of a hero’s adventure of discovery among the Sioux Indians on the pristine Dakota plains of the 1860s. Costner stars as Lt. John Dunbar, a Union officer in the Civil War invited to choose his own post after an act of heroism. Opting for the farthest reaches of the frontier because he “Wants to see it before it disappears,” he transplants himself from a weary and cynical war culture to the windswept clarity of the Dakota plains. Arriving at the remote outpost assigned him by an insane major (Maury Chaykin), Dunbar finds it deserted and, to the disbelief of his wagon driver (Robert Pastorelli), opts to unload his provisions and stay. His only company as he passes the days are his horse, a gangling wolf who keeps a nervous distance, and, finally, a Sioux Indian who tries to steal the horse and is frightened off by Dunbar. Because whites and Indians automatically killed each other upon meeting, each party lived in ignorance of the other. Dunbar’s virtue is that he resists violence, putting himself at risk with the Sioux until they trust him and accept him. Dunbar keeps a journal, hoping to create “a trail for others to follow.” He discovers a culture so deeply refreshing to his spirit, compared with the detritus he’s left behind, that, by the time the U.S. Army bothers to look for him, he has become a Sioux and his name is Dances With Wolves. Of course, the Union soldiers completely misunderstand his purposes, giving pic the tragic cast this saga historically deserves. Script by Michael Blake portrays the Sioux culture with appreciation, establishing within it characters of winning individuality and humor. Design team accents the diverse beauty of the actors (all Native Americans) with striking combinations of paint, feathers and deerskin in costuming. Unfortunately, the script seems to have run out of understanding by the time the Union soldiers arrive to do a job on the “traitor” Dunbar, and portrayal of this loutish and brutal mob, who refuse so much as to hear him out, is pic’s weakest and most manipulative passage. Still, it makes effective drama and, if interpreted metaphorically, the scene conveys the spirit of **** and plunder that had vanquished the Sioux culture within a mere 13 years of this story’s unfolding, according to the screen epilogue. Lensed on location in South Dakota over 17 weeks, pic is infused with the natural grandeur of the plains and sky, captured in all their variance by cinematographer Dean Semler Score by John Barry makes a major contribution, varying from the elegiac tone of the main theme to the spirited adventure of classic Westerns, to the heart-racing primal rhythms of the buffalo and scalp dances. From its three-hour length, which amazingly does not become tiresome, to its bold use of subtitled Lakota language (the Sioux tongue) for at least a third of the dialogue, it’s clear the filmmakers were proceeding without regard for the rules. Their audacity in doing so, because they knew what they had, is as inspiring as the film itself. Costner’s directing style is fresh and assured. A sense of surprise and humor accompany Dunbar’s adventures at every turn, twisting the narrative gently this way and that and making the journey a real pleasure.

“Godzilla” is not so much a remake as a reinvention of the 1954 Japanese production that spawned scores of sequels, comic books and television commercials. (U.S. audiences are more familiar with the first pic’s 1956 Americanized version “Godzilla, King of the Monsters” which incorporated new footage with Raymond Burr as a reporter/narrator.) In the Emmerich-Devlin version, as in the original, the title creature is an unforeseen side effect of nuclear testing. The big difference is, this Godzilla is not a regenerated dinosaur. Rather, fallout from French nuclear blasts in the South Pacific have turned a lizard into a gigantic mutant monster. Only tantalizing bits and pieces of the monster are glimpsed during the early portions of the pic, as screenwriters Devlin and Emmerich (working from a story they concocted with Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio) zip through exposition and introduce lead characters. After an effectively frightening Godzilla attack on a Japanese fishing ship, focus shifts to the Ukraine, where Dr. Niko Tatopoulos (Matthew Broderick), a biologist from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, is studying the effect of radiation leakage on earthworms near Chernobyl. A military team led by Colonel Hicks (Kevin Dunn) drops in to whisk Tatopoulos away to help with a much bigger problem. Joined by paleontologists Elsie Chapman (Vicki Lewis) and Mendel Craven (Malcolm Danare), Tatopoulos and the military team examine, among other things, the beached wreckage of the Japanese vessel. The ship has a huge claw mark on its bow, but that’s not the worst of it. Tatopoulos finds traces of blood that, along with the creature’s footprints, point to the existence of “some sort of enormous reptile.” Right from the start, Broderick conveys a gee-whiz ingenuousness that is distracting at best, insipid at worst. Broderick’s mannered affectations are either meant to humanize a thinly written character or simply provide comic relief. Either way, the performance as a whole comes off as a major miscalculation, to the point of making one miss the morose gravity of Burr in the earlier “Godzilla.” In sharp contrast, Jean Reno takes a winningly subtle approach in offering a crafty mix of foreboding and bemusement as Philippe Roache, a French secret agent who’s working undercover as an insurance company representative. . Throughout “Godzilla,” New York endures the most sustained rainfall in all of movie history. Most of the action takes place at night, but even the daytime scenes unfold under darkly overcast skies, which, of course, makes it all the easier for Emmerich to obscure Godzilla’s features for the maximum amount of time to generate the maximum amount of suspense. But when the creature is fully visible, it resembles nothing more than a hybrid of the mother beast from “Alien” and a T-Rex from “Jurassic Park.” Although the effect is striking, it’s not the familiar creature who often managed to earn audience sympathy, or at least develop a distinct personality. There’s something oddly generic-looking about this computer-generated image. This slimmed-down, turbo-charged beast is able to move easier and lunge more quickly while dashing through the streets of Manhattan. But, then again, why should Godzilla have to dash? Part of what made the original “Godzilla” and its sequels so much fun was Godzilla’s bad-ass, take-no-guff attitude as he lumbered down streets, kicking over buildings and remaining defiantly immune to bullets, bombs and heat-seeking missiles. This Godzilla usually runs away from his attackers, causing most of his damage mostly by accident. There’s no getting around the fact that all the Godzilla offspring bear a suspicious resemblance to the “Jurassic Park” raptors. Just as in that lizard epic, the good guys — joined by TV cameraman Victor (Animal) Palotti (Hank Azaria) race down hallways and crouch behind closed doors, pursued by the hungry creatures and the thrills and spills appear to be recycled from the climactic sequence of “Park.” But the sheer number of the creatures here, and the genuinely clever way Emmerich utilizes them, make for a high-octane adrenaline rush. And the banal dialogue particularly in scenes where Broderick and Pitillo try to sort out their relationship is spiked with a few witty touches. Godzilla designer and supervisor Patrick Tatopoulos whose name is commandeered for Broderick’s character does a bang-up job of creating a lean , mean monster machine. But there is little that is charismatic about his handiwork. As a result, there is no emotional frisson at the very end, even when it’s obvious that the audience should share Broderick’s pang of sorrow for thefallen creature. Size does matter, of course, but some things matter more. The soundtrack is also primed to produce sensory overload, as it is very loud , sometimes discomfortingly so, but the target audience likely would be surprised if it weren’t.

Three hard-working professionals turn out to be pretty hopeless assassins in “Horrible Bosses,” a sorta-dark comedy predicated on the easily relatable notion that killing your supervisor would make the world a much better place. Too craven to take this idea to its properly nasty conclusion, this foul-mouthed effort instead coasts on its leads’ strong three-way chemistry and crack timing (quite literally, in a scene involving spilled cocaine), eliciting steady chuckles even as the plot bogs down in various dumbass shenanigans involving firearms, cell phones and fatal peanut allergies. Written by Michael Markowitz, John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein (from a story by Markowitz), the pic lives up to its blunt title, rapidly introducing three highly competent employees and their impossibly despicable employers. Office drone Nick Hendricks (Jason Bateman) works endless hours on a regular diet of abuse from his sadistic supervisor, Dave Harken (Kevin Spacey). Nick’s two closest buddies aren’t much better off: Dental hygienist Dale Arbus (Charlie Day) must fend off the aggressive sexual advances of Novocain-wielding nymphomaniac Dr. Julia Harris (Jennifer Aniston), while accountant Kurt Buckman (Jason Sudeikis) can only watch as newly installed superior Bobby Pellit (Colin Farrell) destroys his company to finance a coke-snorting, hooker-happy lifestyle. Since Pellit’s reckless waste-disposal methods could result in the deaths of millions, killing him is the only moral thing to do, Kurt argues during a boozy venting session with Dale and Nick. Soon all three of them are plotting to bump off their respective bosses with the help **** (Jamie Foxx) whose expletive-derived name more or less sums up the script’s idea of wit. Bumbling burglaries and high-speed car chases ensue, as “Horrible Bosses” splits the difference between the I’ll-kill-yours-if-you-kill-mine setup of “Strangers on a Train” (directly acknowledged here) and the anti-corporate ethos of “Office Space,” though it’s seldom as amusing or thrilling as that combo would suggest. The manner in which the central scheme plays out is predictably moronic, vulgar and juvenile, though the parties involved just about make up for it. The three lead funnymen (all of whom honed their comedic chops on television) are seasoned enough to make their displays of bumbling ineptitude seem positively skillful, building a consistently amusing rapport while inhabiting well-defined types — Bateman the measured voice of reason, Sudeikis the group’s skirt-chasing id and Day the squeaky third wheel. Structurally, there’s a certain deftness to the way various gags pay off down the road as plot twists; audiences will be gratified to know that the sight of Sudeikis, introducing a toothbrush to an orifice without teeth, is not entirely gratuitous. And director Seth Gordon (“Four Christmases”) seems to grasp that the pic’s kill-your-boss fantasy is primal enough to excuse, and perhaps even warrant, a crude, sloppy approach. Indeed, it’s hard not to wish the helmer had abandoned the safety net and pushed his characters into darker, more daring territory; there’s at least one moment of violence so shockingly abrupt it provides a brief glimpse of the edgier comedy “Horrible Bosses” could have been. As it is, Gordon falls back on over-the-top comic exaggeration by stacking the deck against the three big, bad bosses, who shrewdly account for most of the movie’s collective star wattage. While Aniston seems to be having a fun, vampy time as a succubus in scrubs, she’s the most tangential figure in a film that radiates a casual, leering contempt for women; for his part, Farrell lets his awesome combover do most of the heavy lifting. That leaves Spacey’s ever-reliable snarl to carry the day, lending the pic a twisted energy it could have used more of. Tech credits are appropriately grungier than the usual studio standard. Brisk pic doesn’t overstay its welcome.

A crude concoction sewn together from the severed parts of prior horror/serial killer pics, “SAW” marks a noisy, nasty feature debut for Aussie helmer James Wan and scenarist-thesp Leigh Whannell. Middle-aged Dr. Gordon (Cary Elwes) and young malcontent Adam (Whannell) wake up at opposite ends of a decrepit basement bathroom, ankle-chained to girders, with no idea how they got there — and a corpse on the floor between them. Discovery of an audio cassette explains the doc must snuff Adam within the next few hours, or their unseen captor will murder Gordon’s wife (Monica Potter) and child. Meanwhile, two police **** (Danny Glover, Ken Leung) are on the trail of the mysterious “Jigsaw Killer,” whose prior victims were similarly abducted, then left alone to complete gruesome tasks by deadline. A single, traumatized exception aside, they all failed — and met with grotesquely customized “Seven”-style deaths. Ill-matched two current prisoners wrack their brains and bruise their bodies trying to avoid the same fate. Convoluted screenplay deploys flashbacks within flashbacks, myriad red herrings, false scares and gross-out real ones. But sum effect is less ingenious than desperate, and wholly derivative. Too hyperbolic to be genuinely disturbing, pic nonetheless crosses a line of anything-goes shamelessness by dwelling on the screaming terror of Gordon’s preschool daughter (Makenzie Vega) as she and mom are bound, gagged and handgun-caressed by a masked villain. Elsewhere, there are cheaply effective if unoriginal scares. Filmmakers bring a certain verve to such moments; but building atmosphere and suspense is well beyond them. Ditto handling actors: Left to their own devices amid escalating levels of narrative hysteria, Elwes, Whannell and Potter eventually grow ridiculous. It’s depressing to ponder just what Glover — one of our finest actors — is doing with a routine support part in this slick schlock. One can only hope he was very well paid for the indignity. Tech aspects are pro; loud soundtrack is equivalent of an incessant “Boo!” goosing.

"Dinosaur" is an eye-popping visual spectacle that serves up a vivid picture of what the planet might have looked like when reptiles ruled the Earth. To modern audiences for which technological achievements usually count for far more than artistic ones and special effects coolness very often reps the most valuable possible B.O. component, “Dinosaur” definitely has what it takes. The startling visions of the first few minutes alone a ferocious toothsome attack and a flight over huge herds of dinosaurs inhabiting magnificent actual landscapes are enough to thrill any viewer as well as to serve notice that there’s never been anything quite like this before. The visual splendors continue, to be sure, across the pacy 75 minutes of story time (seven minutes of credits follow). But it’s also the case that, somewhere around half-way through, you begin to get used to the film’s pictorial wondrousness to take it for granted, even and start to realize that the characters and story are exceedingly mundane, unsurprising and pre-programmed. Directors Ralph Zondag and Eric Leighton seem afraid to show anything that will be the least bit disturbing or upsetting to anybody. Sure, 5 year olds will be momentarily frightened by the sight and sound of giant lizards roaring at them, but this is a dinosaur picture that’s petrified of showing death, for God’s sake , that shies away from all the grand elements that could have given it true stature and resonance: Majesty, terror, grandeur, tragedy and savage instincts in their most primitive state. Pic’s sensibility is closer to a “Sesame Street” lesson in caring and cooperation than to any monster favorite one could think of , from the original “The Lost World” and “King Kong” to “Jurassic Park” and even Disney’s own “The Rite of Spring” episode in “Fantasia.” The great leap forward here lies in the incomparably “photorealistic” placement of computer generated creatures within real-world settings. Per the press materials, finished film includes more than 1,300 individual effects shots , and special attention was paid to such difficult-to-achieve illusions as detailed animal muscle movement, physical contact with water and dust, credible shadows and dinosaur p.o.v. shots. All the effort in these areas has paid off magnificently, to the extent that it’s safe to say that the bar has again been raised in this realm of CGI and effects-based pictures. Would that one-tenth as much time and energy gone into developing more musculature and a few additional wrinkles for the storyline. Having begun life in 1988 as a script by Walon Green for Paul Verhoeven to direct as a live-action feature with effects by Phil Tippett (one need only think of “Starship Troopers” to imagine what that might have been like), screenplay as ultimately worked out by John Harrison and Robert Nelson Jacobs feels cobbled together with elements from the likes of “Tarzan,” “The Lion King” and, of all things, “Red River.” Result is synthetic rather than elemental, and with a pre-digested taste. The various creatures are brilliantly rendered; they interact credibly with one another and are integrated seamlessly into the backdrops. But as realistic and expressive as they are, they don’t engage the emotions any more directly than have many more cartoonishly rendered animated characters in the past. In a film in which the foreground technological wonders will be so widely noted, the superlatively chosen backgrounds should be mentioned; fantastic locations in California, Australia, Hawaii, Florida, Venezuela and Western Samoa have been combined to fashion the world of the late Cretaceous Period. James Newton Howard’s orchestral score is unusually good, and the sound work is expert.

"Risky Business" is a movie about male adolescent guilt. In other words, it's a comedy. It's funny because it deals with subjects that are so touchy, so fraught with emotional pain, that unless we laugh there's hardly any way we can deal with them -- especially if we are now, or ever were, a teenage boy. The teenager in the movie is named Joel. His family lives in a suburb on Chicago's North Shore. It's the sort of family that has three cars: the family station wagon, Mom's car, and Dad's Porsche. As the movie opens, Mom and Dad are going off on vacation to a sun-drenched consumer paradise and their only son, Joel, is being left alone at home. It's a busy time in Joel's life. He's got college board exams, an interview with a Princeton admissions officer, and finals at high school. It gets to be an even busier time after his parents leave. Joel gets involved in an ascending pyramid of trouble. He calls a number in one of those sex-contact magazines and meets a young hooker who moves into the house. He runs afoul of the girl's pimp. His mother's expensive Steuben egg is stolen. His dad's Porsche ends up in Lake Michigan. The family home turns into a brothel. He blows two finals. And so on. This description may make "Risky Business" sound like a predictable sitcom. It is not. It is one of the smartest, funniest, most perceptive satires in a long time. It not only invites comparison with "The Graduate," it earns it. Here is a great comedy about teenage sex. The very best thing about the movie is its dialogue. Paul Brickman, who wrote and directed, has an ear so good that he knows what to leave out. This is one of those movies where a few words or a single line says everything that needs to be said, implies everything that needs to be implied, and gets a laugh. When the hooker tells the kid, "Oh, Joel, go to school. Learn something," the precise inflection of those words defines their relationship for the next three scenes. The next best thing about the movie is the casting. Rebecca De Mornay somehow manages to take that thankless role, the hooker with a heart of gold, and turn it into a very specific character. She isn't all good and she isn't all clichés: She's a very complicated young woman with quirks and insecurities and a wayward ability to love. I became quietly astounded when I realized that this movie was going to create an original, interesting relationship involving a teenager and a hooker. The teenage kid, in what will be called the Dustin Hoffman role, is played by Tom Cruise, who also knows how to imply a whole world by what he won't say, can't feel, and doesn't understand. This is a movie of new faces and inspired insights and genuine laughs. It's hard to make a good movie and harder to make a good comedy and almost impossible to make a satire of such popular but mysterious obsessions as guilt, greed, lust, and secrecy. This movie knows what goes on behind the closed bathroom doors of the American dream.

Mob life receives one of its least glamorous screen portraits in "Donnie Brasco," which concentrates on the human toll of an enormously successful real-life FBI infiltration of the New York Mafia. The psychological dimensions of the story remain underrealized, but the loaded central premise and intimate focus the film sustains combine for a very involving and dramatic piece of crime lore that should generate solid late winter biz. In a substantial step down in the gangland pecking order from his roles in the “Godfather” films and “Scarface,” Al Pacino here plays Lefty Ruggiero, a two-bit wiseguy who, as of the tale’s start in 1978, has worked as a loyal foot soldier for 30 years, has done 26 hits by his count but is basically broke and destined not to ascend any higher in the ranks. Brash as he can be, Lefty is intimidated by his boss, Sonny Red (Robert Miano), and lives such an unrewarding home life with his obedient wife and junkie son that it’s no wonder he prefers to spend most of his time with the boys. At his barroom hangout, Lefty meets a young man, Donnie Brasco (Johnny Depp), who quickly impresses him with his knowledge of jewels and his tough-guy prowess. Smart and unafraid to stand his ground, Donnie inspires nothing but confidence as the older man shows him the ropes, giving him, as well as the audience, an irresistibly intriguing guided tour of mob life from the inside. Donnie meets Lefty’s guardedly accepting cohorts, who most importantly include the hulking, explosively temperamental Sonny Black (Michael Madsen), the suspicious Paulie (James Russo) and the more voluble Nicky (Bruno Kirby), and is told that, under Lefty’s sponsorship, he could be on the road to one day becoming a Made Guy in the family. What Lefty never knows, however, is that his streetwise willing student is actually FBI agent Joseph Pistone, who is taping hours of revealing talk and, as he is welcomed further into the mob hierarchy, accumulates mountains of evidence on their illegal activities. The question becomes, how long can Pistone’s successful impersonation last before some slip puts him and the entire operation in jeopardy? The answer is, far too long for Pistone’s wife Maggie, who is forced to endure long months without seeing her husband and is not even able to ask him what he’s doing on the rare occasions he does return to see her and their three daughters. The strain on the marriage becomes almost unendurable, and one can only conclude that such a job is not one for a family man. But Donnie’s ties to his new family are, by contrast, growing stronger, as his proposal for an expansion into Miami is met with approval by the quickly rising Sonny Black. But when the New York group’s new club is raided by Miami police, the boys smell a rat. A subsequent struggle between Sonny Black and Sonny Red for dominance in Gotham inevitably leads to a bloodbath, whereupon it’s only a matter of time until the FBI pulls Donnie out and puts the hammer down on the mob. All this would provide more than enough narrative incident for any movie, but screenwriter Paul Attanasio and director Mike Newell to resist wallowing in the alluring trappings of the gangster genre. Downplaying, although not ignoring, the standard violence, suspense and excitement, the filmmakers keep their attention trained on the growing bond between Lefty and Donnie and the looming betrayal that Donnie knows will doom the man who has taken him under his wing. So Donnie remains an opaque creation. The film does not give him an interior voice, a door into his feelings, so one cannot engage his point of view or even connect with this intriguing and brave man as much as one would like, despite the outward appeal of Depp’s performance. By contrast, Pacino unlooses an unchecked stream of visible thought and emotion, beautifully delineating the need his small-time neighborhood thug has for a best friend and surrogate son. Although perhaps familiar in its outer trappings, Pacino’s fine work is the key to the film succeeding to the extent that it does. Although the supporting actors get across the right attitudes, none of them have roles of sufficient depth to permit more than superficial readings. As Pistone’s wife, Anne Heche gets to do little other than suffer and hurl accusations of neglect. Very proficient in the many scenes with the two main actors, Mike Newell’s direction is a tad soft around the edges and lacks the intense atmospherics normally associated with such fare. Sharp production values accentuate the tacky disco-era look.

An acerbic, darkly comic critique of how social conventions can lead people into false, sterile and emotionally stunted lives, "American Beauty" is a real American original. The landscape of Ball’s story is the familiar one of small-town America, and the initial take on the subject is the equally familiar one of houses with white picket fences and perfectly manicured gardens providing deceptive facades for lives wracked by hostility, tension, noncommunication and perversity. Fortunately, this view is intended not as a revelation but as a given, a starting point for a subtle and acutely judged tale in which nearly every important character metamorphoses in an utterly unpredictable way. Calmly observant narration by Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) informs at the outset that, in less than a year from the start of the story, he’ll be dead. “Of course, I don’t know that yet,” he quips as he and his family are trotted out. Lester is a self-described loser, having lost interest in his job at an advertising magazine as well as in any meaningful relationship with his beautiful, high-strung, real estate agent wife, Carolyn (Annette Bening), and sullen high school-age daughter, Jane (Thora Birch). Family life is a sham for all of them, and they deal with it in different ways: Lester admits it, Carolyn refuses to face it, and Jane is just waiting it out until she can fly the coop. Threatened with dismissal from his job, hangdog Lester finds things begin changing for him when he becomes smitten by Jane’s best friend, Angela (Mena Suvari), a blond Lolita with sex on the brain. Exhilarated by the ludicrous prospect of seducing her, Lester begins obsessively pumping iron and fuels his youthful state of mind by smoking dope with a strange young man, Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley), who has just moved into the house next door with his father (Chris Cooper), a recently retired Marine Corps colonel, and shut-down mother (Allison Janney). Ricky frequently takes surreptitious video footage of Jane, and when she calls him on it, an unlikely but oddly convincing romantic friendship begins blossoming that finally gives Jane a release for her emotional frustration. Carolyn, for her part, seeks an outlet in the most conventional manner, lurching into a motel-room affair with the debonair “king” of local real estate, Buddy Kane (Peter Gallagher). Evidently the only well-adjusted and relatively happy people in the neighborhood are “Jim and Jim” (Scott Bakula and Sam Robards), a gay couple with whom Lester takes up jogging. One of the film’s constant sources of delight and surprise is the way characters both hide and reveal their private interests, and how they are often perceived and misjudged by others. It is not giving away too much or going too far into the story’s many mysteries to say that Lester can approach serenity and even a state of grace despite his initial wormlike status; that Ricky confidently pursues a secret life in spite of close surveillance from his martinet father, who forces his son to submit to regular urine tests for drug use; that Carolyn’s materialist preoccupation has, in fact, become her substance, and that Jane’s amorphous personality is susceptible to being shaped in just about any direction by the first strong personality she meets. Consistently provocative and devilishly amusing through the first hour, pic clicks into high gear midway when Lester and Carolyn finally have it out. They don’t declare war, exactly, but Lester decides to let down any pretense to responsibility or normalcy in order to do his own thing as he did when he was 20, carefree and full of expectation. Blackmailing his boss for a big severance package, he hilariously takes a gig at the job at which he was always happiest, flipping burgers at a fast-food restaurant, buys his dream car and openly smokes weed whenever he wants. His new freewheeling approach to life makes him giddy, so much so that he believes he and his wife can revive their long-buried sexual relationship. But Carolyn and Jane are appalled at his breezy, tell-it-like-it-is attitude, fomenting a mood of anxious melodrama leading to the event promised by the opening narration. Mendes, the hottest young British theater director of recent years, on the basis of “Cabaret” and “The Blue Room,” displays a very sure hand in his first film. As precise and controlled in its effects as his legit work, “American Beauty” is stylized in its images and humor, and Mendes has been exceedingly fortunate in working with a cinematographer as skillful as vet Conrad L. Hall, who is unsurpassed in his ability to augment the meaning of the material he films by finding its perfect visual correlative. Naomi Shohan’s production design and Julie Weiss’ costumes enhance the film’s look of designed reality, while Thomas Newman’s score and the many adroitly chosen song snippets often create ironic counterpoint to the exceptionally tart and entertaining proceedings.

Leonardo DiCaprio stars as a man struggling to survive in the wild in Alejandro G. Inarritu's bloody, bruising frontier epic. A traditional Old West survival-and-revenge tale assumes the dimensions of a harrowing voyage to the American frontier's heart of darkness in The Revenant. Pushing both brutal realism and extravagant visual poetry to the edges of what one customarily finds in mainstream American filmmaking, director/co-writer Alejandro G. Inarritu, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and a vast team of visual effects wizards have created a sensationally vivid and visceral portrait of human endurance under very nearly intolerable conditions; this is a film that makes you quite glad to have been born in a century with insulation and central heating. The combination of stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy, the director and critical enthusiasm in most quarters will make this Fox release a must for audiences in search of cinematic red meat (something the story offers up in abundance, and mostly uncooked), although vegetarians and viewers with otherwise delicate constitutions could spend half their time squirming with their sweaters pulled up over their eyes. For a director who normally takes several years between films, Inarritu has remarkably turned around his most ambitious physical production within just one year of his awards-laden Birdman. Even the untutored eye would quickly recognize this as the work of the same key talents; The Revenant may use plenty of cuts and is set nearly entirely outdoors, but the fluid, prowling, sometimes gasp-inducing camera moves, along with the great depth of field, are the same. And both films are about men on the brink, in severe extremis, a condition that helps justify and sustain Inarritu's artistic high-wire act. It's Jeremiah Johnson meets Apocalypse Now. Set in 1823 in the Rockies, less than two decades after Lewis and Clark led their map-altering, continent-opening expedition through the territory, the story is based on actual people whose real names are used in the film as well as in Michael Punke's 2002 novel, upon which the script is quite accurately described as being "based in part." In a way, the biggest difference between the novel and the film is that the former is aided by a map, very specific descriptions of the proximity of rivers, forts and other landmarks, which provide clear indications of how far the gravely injured hero must travel to get to what might pass for civilization in this context but certainly not in any other. Inarritu shares screenplay credit with Mark L. Smith, whose prior creative endeavors lie in the realm of low-budget horror (Séance, the Vacancy duo, The Hole), and the script immediately ups the story's existential ante by deliberately not revealing how long a journey mountain man Hugh Glass (DiCaprio) might be facing, or whether he has any realistic hope of finding any place with a roof over it. On top of this, any temptation to provide the central character with interior monologues to reveal his anguished thoughts and feelings has been resisted; for most of the running time, he is limited to expressing himself via painful grunts and cries and very heavy breathing. Their ranks decimated and with winter closing in, the white men decide to head back, which brings on the scene, 25 minutes in, that which no one who sees it will soon forget (and which will certainly pass through the mind of any viewer who in future takes a hike through bear country). While taking a rest in the forest, Glass is charged by a mother grizzly bear. The man injures her with the one shot he gets off from his long-barreled rifle but then can do nothing as the incensed creature slaps, claws, bites, rips open and steps on him with her giant paws before retreating. Beyond the sheer terror she provokes, the bear's behavior is fascinating to observe; for a good while, she sniffs and assesses her adversary closely, both in the manner of a cook judging the seasoning of a dish and a kid deciding about whether to play with a toy any longer. She retreats ... and then comes back for more. The score by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto, with additional music by Bryce Dessner, is effectively ominous and grim. It has been noted before, but The Revenant indicates, more than any film Lubezki has shot, the influence of the Russian team of director Mikhail Kalatozov and cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky on his work. A brutal and gripping pre-Western.

Sci-fi/fantasy extravaganza is a labor of love for helmer Guillermo del Toro, and acknowledged comic buff. Based on Mike Mignola's cult-fave comic series, pic has more than enough across-the-board appeal to attract mainstream auds unfamiliar with source material. Inspired primarily by “Seed of Destruction,” Mignola’s first “Hellboy” story cycle, and “The Corpse,” a later tale recently reissued by Dark Horse, del Toro’s scenario occasionally echoes “Men in Black,” “X-Men,” del Toro’s own “Mimic” — and more than a few classic tales by horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. Effective blood-and-thunder prologue set during WWII introduces Trevor “Broom” Bruttenholm (initially played by Kevin Trainor) as a supernatural expert for Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense, a super-secret U.S. organization dedicated to battling German efforts to wage war with black magic. On a dark, stormy night in Scotland, Broom and an Army commando unit interrupt curiously undead Grigori Rasputin (Karel Roden) as the infamous Russian mystic leads **** scientists and soldiers in an effort to use a “Hell-Hole Generator” to transport Ogdru Jahad (a.k.a., Seven Gods of Chaos) to Earth. A gun battle, the pic’s first spectacular set piece, ensues. After the battle, Rasputin disappears with two key associates — Kroenen (Ladislav Beran), masked and blade-wielding immortal, and Ilsa (Bridget Hodson), icy blond beauty. But Broom and commandos find the generator did manage to transport a surprise package: A bright red imp festooned with horns and a pointed tail. Broom names the foundling Hellboy. Sixty-plus years later, anailing, aging Broom (John Hurt) is still aligned with Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense, and is still serving as surrogate father to Hellboy (Ron Perlman). Latter has grown into a massive and muscular figure with a misshapen right hand (credit Rick Baker for spot-on Hellboy makeup). Big guy smokes cigars, gobbles Baby Ruths and speaks in the terse, tough-guy argot of a film noir hero. But he keeps his horns filed downso the stubs resemble a pair of goggles pushed onto his forehead. Hellboy lives with Broom at BPRD headquarters in Newark, N.J., usually venturing out only to aid in investigation and destruction of paranormal threats. Occasionally, however, he takes unauthorized trips into the outside world, causing “Hellboy sightings” that must be explained away by government spokesperson — and, secretly, BPRD supervisor — Tom Manning (Jeffrey Tambor). Lately, Hellboy has repeatedly gone AWOL to reconnect with sad-eyed Liz Sherman (Selma Blair), who fled BPRD and committed herself to a mental hospital because she fears she can no longer control her fire-spreading, pyrokinetic powers. H.B. loves her, of course, but duty calls. Along with fellow BPRD regular Abe Sapien (played by Doug Jones, amusingly voiced by unbilled David Hyde Piece), a scaly and telepathic “gill man” who thrives underwater, H.B. joins Broom and other agents at a Manhattan museum where an immense monster is wreaking havoc. The monster, Sammael(Brian Steele), a well-nigh indestructible beast, resembles the love child of “Alien” and an octopus. Sammael and its spawn are controlled by the newly revived Rasputin. Pointedly disdaining the current craze for wire work and martial artistry in movie mayhem, del Toro provides an abundance of two-fisted, straight-shooting action throughout “Hellboy.” Title character’s dust-ups with Sammael and other icky creeps are at once rousingly exciting and explosively funny, often playing like oversized smackdowns between WWE superstars. However, del Toro isn’t always attentive to coherent transitions while warp-speeding through his storyline. Worse, he occasionally neglects to prepare uninitiated auds with context from the comic books. Well-cast thesps generate rooting interest in their individual characters, thereby propelling plot momentum through sheer force of their colorful personalities. Del Toro provides nifty quirks and eccentricities for characters: Edgy relationship between Hellboy and Manning (well played by Tambor) builds toward amusing pay-off. Ultimately, on-screen actors (and unseen Pierce) prove to be pic’s most important special effects. Perlman is terrifically boisterous and literally larger than life in title role, yet also elicits sympathy. In this, he is immeasurably aided by Hurt, who’s genuinely poignant in his relationship with Broom’s “son.” Blair offers a career-best performance as Liz, conveying a wealth of mixed emotions with each wanly melancholy smile. Newcomer Rupert Evans is engagingly game as John Myers, a young FBI agent. Production designers and f/x supervisors are fantastically impressive in their rendering of del Toro’s darkly imaginative take on “Hellboy” mythos.

Simple Yet Effective 'Witch' Hunt. The big question hanging over "The Blair Witch Project" is simple but devastatingly effective. What happened to the three friends, Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael Williams, who dove deep into the Maryland woods in search of witches and never returned? The date was Oct. 21, 1994, according to the opening titles. It's always creepier with a date, isn't it? You can almost hear Robert Stack's voice in the narration, as the titles also inform us: "One year later, their footage was found." The trio in the movie – led by Donahue (and portraying themselves) – was trying to make a documentary about the Blair Witch, a spirit believed to be haunting this sparsely inhabited corner of Maryland's Black Hills Forest. But all that remains of their five-day trek into the heart of darkness is the footage in Leonard's 16mm camera and Donahue's High-8 video. Which we get to watch. Well, what happened? You won't find out by reading this. But I will say "Blair" was a good college try of a flick – as good an effort as one could expect of a film with no budget, one pretty good idea and a few creative minds trying to come up with an MTV-age campfire movie. Imagine a collaboration between George "Night of the Living Dead" Romero and the makers of "The Real World." Donahue is the director of this witch-finding documentary, a young, idealistic person with a fairly good idea of the history behind the Blair Witch. Too bad she's not too hot with scouting skills. Before embarking into the woods, Donahue and crew interview the locals, who have heard a story or two about that Witch Up There. That's another essential ingredient in a horror flick – the creepy past that preceded all this. Good stuff! With these veiled, anecdotal warnings, the film crew – young, ambitious and dude-like – heads straight for the heart of darkness. Or Maryland, anyway. Although they have a map and compass, they become hopelessly lost. As they realize how unmoored they are, their initial good humor becomes fraught with anxiety, tears, disbelief, boredom, depression and occasional yelling. Was that the same log bridge across the creek they saw hours earlier? Do they go south or east now? What are those noises outside their tents at night? What happened to the smokes? As they become increasingly frayed and freaked, we start preparing for the worst. And that's where I'm leaving it. "The Blair Witch Project" is certainly assured and savvy enough for the government work that we romantically refer to as "American Independent Moviemaking." I was hooked on its creepy possibilities right through to the end. What's good about this film is the way its actual creators – Ed Sanchez, Dan Myrick and Gregg Hale – use ellipses and suggestion to make our minds do most of the work. Most of the time, it's what the three witch-searchers don't see – but fear – that gets our petrified juices flowing or curdling. This is low-tech inventiveness at its best. And that, surely, is what campfire storytelling is all about.

The dark seeps out of the screen like living thing, evidence that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is more than a paycheck to director David Fincher, who has improbably affixed his own imprint on a movie that comes weighted down with possibilities and expectations no filmmaker should have to contend with. Aided by a tightly-wrapped screenplay adapted from Stieg Larsson's global best-seller by Steven Zaillian, Fincher strips the material to its skeleton, then adds back the sinew and tissue to create something that is unmistakably The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but in no way a carbon copy of the earlier Swedish movie or the book itself. This is what a movie adaptation should be: a film whose base narrative has its roots in the source material but whose soul can be identified through the images that unfold on screen. When, in early 2010, Columbia Pictures announced their intention to film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the question that crossed many lips was, "Why?" After all, there was already a very good adaptation available, a 2009 Swedish production directed by Niels Arden Oplev with a star-making turn from Noomi Rapace. The intention to "remake" The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in English with an A-list star smacked of a cash-grab. Whatever the motivations, however, this interpretation of Larsson's story can stand proudly alongside the Swedish version. Both tell the same basic story, but there are enough differences - some subtle, some significant - that each can be enjoyed on its own terms. And, although Oplev will always have the distinction of being first, the strengths of Fincher's film reminds us that first is not always best. Two key elements differentiate Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo from Oplev's (and please don't misread this in any way as a denunciation of the Swedish interpretation, which was one of my top films of 2010). The first is the aesthetic. Filmed with a bigger budget and an auteur behind the camera, the 2011 movie is steeped in bleak, cold darkness. Everything, from the wintery setting to the gloomy interiors to the way scenes are photographed, enhances this aspect. Oplev's approach was more straightforward and not as assured. The second is the way the characters are represented. Fincher softens the edges and presents us with more emotionally complex individuals. Oplev emphasizes individual characteristics. Some of the characters in the 2009 movie are little more than caricatures (the vile and sadistic Bjurman being an example), but Fincher quests for ambiguity. If The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo represents Fincher's view of human nature (and, considering the darkness of his early films, that may be the case), it puts him alongside David Lynch as one who believes society breeds hidden rot and corruption. Those elements lie at the heart of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and, despite occasional moments of macabre humor, Fincher allows them to fester. I am reminded of a line from I, Claudius: "Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out." Zaillian's screenplay does a better job than the one penned by Nikolaj Arcel & Rasmus Heisterberg in distilling Larssson's convoluted story into something movie audiences can absorb without a primer. In fairness to the writers of the Swedish version, their 180-minute original lost 28 minutes in the transition from TV mini-series to motion picture, and that's part of the reason for its occasionally erratic tone and discontinuities. Still, Zaillian has surgically altered Larsson's book for the screen by cutting, adding, and changing where necessary. The final result is a coherent, well-developed murder mystery that is neither rushed nor sluggish. The supporting cast includes well-known names like Christopher Plummer (as Henrik), Robin Wright (as Mikael's co-editor at Millennium magazine, Erika Berger), and Stellan Skarsgard (as Henrik's nephew, Martin), and less familiar ones like Steven Berkoff (as Henrik's lawyer, Frode) and Yorick van Wageningen (as the detestable Bjurman). Aside from Craig, there are no bona fide "stars" in the mix, but the cast is well-chosen. Everyone does an excellent job and Mara will undoubtedly receive as Oscar nomination for this brave, star-making turn. Regardless of what happens in the future, however, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo can stand on its own as Fincher's valentine to goth girl power, detective stories, and the grotesqueness of the human heart.

Jurassic Park” will at least disabuse anyone of the idea that it would be fun to share the planet with dinosaurs. Steven Spielberg’s scary and horrific thriller may be one-dimensional and even clunky in story and characterization, but it definitely delivers where it counts, in excitement, suspense and the stupendous realization of giant prehistoric reptiles. Having finally found another set of “Jaws” worthy of the name, Spielberg and Universal have a monster hit on their hands. Very cleverly, the film positions itself both as a dark look at a theme park gone awry, and as a theme park itself. Merchandising, Universal tour attractions and sequels will extend the profits enormously. The only thing that will keep this properly PG-13-rated extravaganza from approaching rarefied “Star Wars” and “E.T.” B.O. heights is its inappropriateness for kids under 10 or 12 — it’s just too intense, although many preteens will no doubt go anyway. The $ 60 million production (a bargain at the cost) follows the general idea if not the letter of Michael Crichton’s 1990 bestseller, which was no doubt partly inspired by Conan Doyle’s “The Lost World,” the fanciful story of a remote land inhabited by otherwise extinct beasts. Basis of this hi-tech, scientifically based, up-to-date version lies in the notion that living, breathing and eating full-sized dinosaurs can be biologically engineered using fossilized dino DNA. Having accomplished this in secret on an island off Costa Rica, zillionaire entrepreneur/tycoon John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) brings in a small group of experts to view and, he hopes, endorse his miracle, which he intends to parlay into the world’s most expensive zoo-cum-amusement park. Arriving to inspect the menagerie are paleontologists Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), as well as oddball mathematician Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), advocate of the Chaos Theory, a sort of arithmetic equivalent of Murphy’s Law. Also along for the look-see are Donald Gennaro (Martin Ferrero), a hard-nosed attorney repping the park’s investors, and Hammond’s two fresh-faced grandchildren, Lex (Ariana Richards) and Tim (Joseph Mazzello). Early introductory scenes are surprisingly perfunctory and even sloppy. There are several bad cuts unworthy of a filmmaker of Spielberg’s skill, and the script wouldn’t pass muster in Screenwriting 101. Curiously, the suspenseful structuring of the novel’s opening chapters, in which characters are mysteriously bitten, is abandoned here in favor of some foreshadowing and cross-cutting a la “The Exorcist.” Equally surprisingly, Spielberg lets the cat out of the bag as far as the dinosaurs are concerned very early, showing some of them in full view after only 20 minutes, lessening the suspense that could have been cranked way up through the accumulation of sounds and partial sightings. Still, none of these problems matter once the film clicks into high gear. When a storm strands two carloads of Hammond’s guests in the middle of the park at night, a Tyrannosaurus Rex decides it’s dinnertime. In a terrifically suspenseful and sustained sequence, the ferocious monster attacks the vehicles and its inhabitants, chowing down on one and terrorizing the others, particularly the children. Suddenly, after a fitful first hour, Spielberg pulls off one of the most exciting set pieces of his career, highlighted by a stunning shot of a T-Rex in a rearview mirror and climaxed by a gag lifted from Buster Keaton’s “Steamboat Bill Jr.” Moving toward the climax, viewers will be reminded of “Aliens” as two mid-sized Velociraptors attack through industrial ceilings and floors, and play a suspenseful cat-and-mouse game with the kids in a huge kitchen. Final action scene is ironically played out as three monsters attack in a display room festooned with mounted dinosaur skeletons, which will give kids occasion to decide whether they prefer their dinosaurs alive or dead. It was unimaginable that Spielberg would proceed with “Jurassic Park” if he wasn’t certain that his dinosaurs would be the best ever seen onscreen, and the result shows that assumption to be true. The monsters are far more convincing than the human characters. Just about everyone is defined by one trait only — Dr. Grant dislikes children, Ellie is good-natured, Ian is the sardonic skeptic, Dennis is the sweaty traitor and Samuel L. Jackson’s computer technician always has a cigarette in his mouth. Technically, the film is sometimes more than it needs to be. As in some of Spielberg’s previous outings, Dean Cundey’s lensing overdoes the back illumination and shafts of light at times, and John Williams’ score gets unnecessarily bombastic. But the dinosaurs rule here, and Spielberg and his team of special effects aces have put something on the screen that people have never seen before, which is the surest way to create a blockbuster.

A muscular and bloody combat picture, a compelling revenge drama and a truly transporting trip back nearly 2,000 years, Ridley Scott’s bold epic of imperial intrigue and heroism brings new luster and excitement to a tarnished and often derided genre that nonetheless provided at least one generation of moviegoers with some of its most cherished youthful memories. Jagged and impressionistic in a way clearly influenced by “Saving Private Ryan,” 10-minute opening battle is a savage spectacle, as General Maximus (Crowe) commands his troops to “unleash hell” on their overmatched adversaries with a deluge of arrows and flaming canisters that set the barbarians’ protective woods on **** as external conflicts are put to rest, internal trouble is only beginning. The arrogant and unbalanced Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) arrives at the front, along with his beautiful older sister, Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), just in time to learn that his ailing father (Richard Harris) has named the triumphant Maximus his successor as emperor. For his part, Maximus, a Spaniard who has never seen Rome and, far more important, has been separated from his wife and son for nearly three years, wants no part of this **** Maximus makes the mistake of spurning Commodus. After killing his father in a fit of jealous spite, the insecure new emperor orders the execution of the popular general. The resourceful Maximus escapes this fate but reaches home too late; when he arrives, he finds his wife and son dead, his farm torched. In the poetic manner of Sergio Leone, Scott uses a man of action’s bitter and idealized memory of his lost family as a motif and a motive for the single-minded pursuit to which he devotes the remainder of his life. At the 45-minute mark, action shifts to a distant North African outpost of the empire, where the captive Maximus is taken as slave. Purchased by gladiatorial entrepreneur Proximo (Oliver Reed), Maximus conceals his true identity but, when thrown into the arena for the first time, he fights well as a team with the African Juba (Djimon Hounsou), who will become his closest confidant. In the meantime, of course, Maximus must survive arena combat that is heavily rigged against him. The gladiatorial contests are tense, dynamic and brutal, to be sure, and probably no less or more violent than most viewers would want them to be. Less fetishistic about the weaponry and modes of fighting than “Spartacus” and some other Roman combat pictures of yore, “Gladiator,” with its fast flurries of action and jump cuts, emphasizes the ferocious speed and urgency of every move in the arena, to the slight detriment of spatial unity and action continuity; in terms of the classical building of tension in a one-on-one fight, the standard is still the Anthony Quinn-Jack Palance battle in Richard Fleischer’s “Barabbas.” But “Gladiator” enjoys a solid foundation in the strength of Maximus, the vividness of its evocation of the Roman world and the integrity of the story arc. Script by David Franzoni, John Logan and William Nicholson shrewdly appropriates touchstone moments from previous epics, just as it also cuts down the talk to a minimum when possible; there is none of the windy speechifying that ground many an epic to a halt in decades past. The action is presented in strictly Roman terms, with none of the Judeo-Christian angle so common to the genre in the ’50s. The film revels in both the glory and the horror that were Rome. Proximo’s luminous description of the Colosseum to Maximus beautifully conjures an image of what was then the center of the universe, and the games themselves are presented in context as gaudy, lowbrow entertainment. Countless details in Arthur Max’s brilliant production design and Janty Yates’ highly diversified costume design are offered up in wonderfully offhand fashion. But the scene stealer, in his last role before his death on location, is Reed, who hadn’t brought such relish to a performance in years, and to whom the film is dedicated. Proximo’s excitement over being able to return to Rome brings out the old man’s boyish delight in his profession, which he insists is just “entertainment,” and Reed clearly reveled in both the physicality and the modestly hammy opportunities the part presented. Pic reps a great sendoff for him and a fine way to be remembered. Production represented a gargantuan undertaking in four countries; even if the film is a big hit, it’s unlikely that the genre will come back in any significant way due to the costs involved. CGI effects have allowed numerous sets, notably the Colosseum, to be enhanced in size and spectacle value; the stunts, fights and battles are as forceful and realistic as anyone could want, John Mathieson’s widescreen cinematography is magnificent, and the pacing across 2½ hours is well modulated.

In the realm of sequels, “Toy Story 2” is to “Toy Story” what “The Empire Strikes Back” was to its predecessor, a richer, more satisfying film in every respect. The comparison between these two franchises will be pursued no further, given their utter dissimilarity. But John Lasseter and his team, their confidence clearly bolstered by the massive success of their 1995 blockbuster, have conspired to vigorously push the new entry further with fresh characters, broadened scope, boisterous humor and, most of all, a gratifying emotional and thematic depth. Disney and Pixar have an end-of-millennium behemoth here, one that, given its far greater appeal to girls by virtue of its female co-lead, could easily surpass the $362 million grossed by “Toy Story” worldwide. The only thing this sparkling picture lacks, by definition, is the shock of the new; four years ago, it was startling to behold the frontier that computer animation had conquered, to see what vast possibilities were now available in the whole field of animation. But there is no sense of complacency or sameness, as the filmmakers get their charges out of the house and into a situation that gives their lives more poignancy and awareness of mortality than, frankly, most characters in live-action films are accorded these days. After an overly assaultive outer-space teaser that will nonetheless serve its purpose of getting kids to shut up and pay attention, brisk set-up sees the affable Woody eagerly anticipating being taken to a summer Cowboy Camp by his owner, Andy. But excitement quickly turns to crushing disappointment when a “broken” arm causes Woody to be left behind, with Andy’s mom adding the final sting with the comment, “Toys don’t last forever.” Woody’s nightmare of being flung into the trash heap of broken toys comes true when he inadvertently lands in a yard-sale 25¢ bin, from which he’s kidnapped by the greedy Al McWhiggin, owner of the local Al’s Toy Barn, who knows something that Woody himself doesn’t — that Woody was a big TV star back in the ’50s. Stashed in a downtown building, Woody meets cowgirl Jessie, Stinky Pete the Prospector and a horse named Bullseye and, in a wonderfully entertaining interlude, learns of his long-ago celebrity on a show called “Woody’s Roundup,” a kids’ favorite in which Woody and his new acquaintances were puppets. Not only that, but a whole line of commercial products revolved around the show, including the cereal Cowboy Crunchies. Al’s impressive collection of Woody memorabilia was incomplete without its centerpiece, but now that Woody is safely in hand, Al plans to cash in by selling the whole set to a museum in Japan. Locked in a high-rise room with his torn limb, there is nothing Woody can do to save himself, so it’s up to spaceman Buzz Lightyear and Andy’s other toys, including Rex the dinosaur, Hamm the pig, Mr. Potato Head and Slinky Dog, to mount a rescue expedition. They head first for the Toy Barn, where some Barbies come to delightful life and Buzz is astonished to find hundreds of exact replicas of himself on the shelves one of whom throws a monkey wrench into the search for Woody by boxing Buzz up and taking his place on the team. Back in the building, the normally rambunctious Jessie begins tugging at Woody’s heart as well as that of the viewer by pointing out that, unlike Woody, who has enjoyed many years with a loving owner, she has endured a long purgatory in storage, bereft of any life worth living. In the film’s main and moving new song, “When She Loved Me,” penned by Randy Newman and sung by Sarah McLachlan, Jessie recalls how she once had an enchanted relationship with a girl, one that she thought could never end, but that after her owner outgrew her, she ended up, like so many other toys, in a donation box. It’s the fate of all toys, she ruefully reflects, to outlive their usefulness, so the prospect of Japan for her at least means that she will provide pleasure again and have some purpose in life. Caught up short by this intimation of mortality, Woody suddenly finds himself conflicted, torn between the “blood” family of his old TV cohorts and his closest friends from Andy’s house. Arrival of the rescue party puts his true loyalty to an immediate test, one complicated by Al’s decision to leave at once for Japan. Dynamite action climax, which proceeds through a maze-like roller-coaster ride on airport baggage ramps, into the belly of a jet and out onto the landing gear during takeoff, deftly combines a modern setting with rousing cowboy heroics, while resolution of the main characters’ fates has a sweetly philosophical ring that satisfies while still taking into account the darker issues raised earlier. Visually, “Toy Story 2” is entirely of a piece with its predecessor, distinguished by the same endearing character design and reality-nudging peripheral details.

When J.J. Abrams released Cloverfield in 2008, it arrived cloaked in secrecy. Now, some eight years later, the film’s so-called “blood relative” (Abrams’ term, not mine), comes with a similar marketing strategy. Going-in, viewers are unlikely to be certain what to expect and, emerging, they might not be quite sure exactly what they witnessed. The problems with 10 Cloverfield Lane result from attempts to tie it, however tenuously, to the earlier movie. Take away the disappointing, disjointed, and anti-climactic final act, and this is an effective white-knuckle psychological thriller. And, although the final 15 minutes don’t ruin the movie, they detract from its better parts. The premise is simple: following a car accident, Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) awakens to find herself chained to a wall in what appears to be a basement. She soon learns that she has been brought to this place by the hulking, rather scary Howard (John Goodman), for her “own good.” The basement is actually a doomsday bunker with three occupants: survivalist Howard; his former handyman, Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.); and Michelle, whom Howard rescued from her smashed car. In the outside world, all is not well. According to Howard, apocalyptic events have occurred. His plan is for the three of them to shelter in place and wait it out until things are safe. Michelle thinks he’s crazy. Emmett isn’t so certain. By using double-bluffs and red herrings, director Dan Trachtenberg crafts a claustrophobic psychological thriller that hums along nicely. **** misdirection abounds. From moment-to-moment we’re never quite sure who (or what) Howard really is: a lonely savior whose paranoia has been validated or a creepy kidnapper acting out a twisted delusion? Is the situation outside the bunker real or a figment of Howard’s warped mind? Did “the Ruskies” attack? Or aliens? Or nothing at all? Perhaps Howard faked the mutilations of some pigs to “prove” that the air isn’t safe? So many questions… At times, 10 Cloverfield Lane has a similar vibe as the TV series Lost which, not coincidentally, was produced by Abrams’ Bad Robot Productions. While keeping us guessing, 10 Cloverfield Lane provides several nail-biting scenes. Sound is an important part of how the tension is amplified - every noise is loud and the insistent musical score throbs. 10 Cloverfield Lane doesn’t employ “found footage” like the original Cloverfield. Camera movement is smooth and clean and the shots are composed to emphasize how cramped and uncomfortable the limited space is. The movie is presented from Michelle’s perspective and its tone varies with her mood. Her opinion of Howard and the situation changes frequently and the film reflects that. There’s even a goofy musical montage that shows the three companions playing board games and putting together puzzles like any “normal” family. Winstead is a good choice to play the heroine because she’s strong yet feminine. (She previously appeared as Bruce Willis’ daughter in the fourth Die Hard film and as the lead in the prequel to John Carptenter’s The Thing.) John Goodman is a perfect Howard - Goodman has the rare talent of being able to play both a cuddly, likeable guy and a frighteningly dangerous one. In 10 Cloverfield Lane, he’s asked to do both. The film’s failing is that, in linking it to Cloverfield, it abandons the elements that made the majority of the movie effective. The final fifteen minutes don’t work as a way to wrap up this story or as an introduction to a larger (generic) canvas. They feel tacked-on and rushed. Nevertheless, as weak as the conclusion may be, it doesn’t obfuscate the good things to precede it. 10 Cloverfield Lane is packed with suspense and tension and offers some of the best bait-and-switch work of any recent psychological thriller. It’s easy to forgive any missteps toward the end when considering the entire package.

Cloverfield is to the monster movie as The Blair Witch Project was to the ghost story. This movie is going to divide audiences. There are those who will be unable to endure nearly 90 minutes of constantly moving hand-held camerawork. Some will experience motion sickness. Others will just be annoyed and disoriented by the experience. These are legitimate reactions, but Cloverfield isn't trying to present another run-of-the-mill rampaging monster movie. You can rent a bunch of those on DVD. Do we really need another one? Instead, producer J.J. Abrams and his creative team want to represent a catastrophic event from ground level. If 9/11 taught us one thing, it's that when disaster strikes, cameras are turned on. Cloverfield's gritty, in-your-face style is uncompromising. If you're looking for a nice, clean movie filmed with a steadycam, you'll have to look elsewhere. Cloverfield owes a debt to The Blair Witch Project. The most obvious similarity is the decision to show the entire event through the lens of a camera. The structure is similar as well - a slow build-up as we get to know the characters. Here's where one of Blair Witch's flaws creeps into Cloverfield. The opening sequences last too long. They're supposed to be introducing us to the protagonists, but they're dull and a little tedious. We start itching for something to happen. For 20 minutes, experiencing Cloverfield is like watching the home movies of strangers. (But maybe you're into that sort of thing...) As with The Blair Witch Project, however, once things start happening, the intensity explodes off the screen. The inability to see exactly what is happening is part of the film's appeal. Some will find it frustrating. Others will find it exhilarating. First of all, don't expect linear storytelling with all of the holes plugged. Nothing concrete is revealed about the monster (although there is speculation). Is it from outer space? From deep in the ocean? Why is it in New York? What are its capabilities? What eventually happens to it? By confining the action in the film to what's on the videotape, Cloverfield eliminates the need to talk to these points. In fact, we never get a completely clear shot of the creature (at least not in the sense one would expect from a traditional motion picture), although there is a very nice close-up headshot late in the film. Still, the movie follows the Jaws rule that monsters are usually more intimidating when they are shown infrequently and only in brief glimpses. Even having seen the movie, I would be hard-pressed to give a coherent description of the thing. All I can say is that it's big and it's ugly. The disaster wrought upon New York raises shadows of 9/11. How could it not? A scene in a street where a **** collapses and the dust cloud rolls toward the characters is a carbon copy of one of the most horrific images from that real-life tragedy. Cloverfield also offers the destruction of icons: a decapitated Statue of Liberty and a devastated Brooklyn Bridge. There are plenty of landmarks to go after in New York without having to touch the Empire State Building. That place has already had enough attention over the years from King Kong. One has to wonder whether the filmmakers went too far in so forcefully evoking 9/11. Then again, to tell this story in this way, was there an alternative? What does the handheld camera bring to Cloverfield? There's a sense of immediacy that couldn't be obtained in any other way. We're in the trenches with these characters, not looking at them from a safe distance. There's an intensity that couldn't be achieved in any other way. Consider, for example, the scene in the subway when Hud turns on the camera's night vision. No other approach could have yielded that result. In fact, today's viewers might be more willing to accept this perspective than those who booed The Blair Witch Project after it made the leap from art houses to multiplexes. It is, after all, the point-of-view presented by many video games - the so-called "first person shooters." And there's something else to consider: make Cloverfield conventional, and how is it different from the 1998 version of Godzilla? The movie is interesting because it's so damn different. But try as he might, director Matt Reeves (making his first feature in a dozen years) cannot develop his human cut-outs into three-dimensional people, and that's what keeps Cloverfield from being truly memorable.

‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes’ Continues the Saga. A quick montage at the beginning of “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” fills us in on what has happened since “Rise of the Planet of the Apes.” Three years have gone by for us in the audience, and about a decade for the assorted primates on the screen. James Franco and millions of other people are dead, victims of a lethal virus and the usual apocalypse-causing disease of hubris. After a period of violence and chaos, the survivors have cobbled together a reasonably stable society in the ruins of San Francisco, with Gary Oldman in charge. But this is not “Dusk of the Planet of the Humans.” The spectacle of yet another desperate population, huddled together in the wake of catastrophe to await the next zombie, alien, robot or monster attack, would be unlikely to inspire much excitement. The real interest lies across the battered Golden Gate Bridge, in Marin County, where our evolutionary cousins, under the benevolent guidance of an upright-walking chimpanzee named Caesar, have built their own civilization. In contrast to the bedraggled human colony, the ape encampment is a thriving city-state with distinctive wooden architecture, domesticated horses, a sophisticated (mostly signed) language and an educational system overseen by Maurice, the gentle, copper-furred orangutan who gave the first movie an extra fillip of soul. The sylvan, simian Athens in the Muir Woods is a remarkable achievement and an important part of what makes “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes,” directed by Matt Reeves from a script by Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver and Mark Bomback, the best of this summer’s large-scale, big-studio franchise movies. Granted, this isn’t a very high bar to clear: “better than ‘Transformers 4’ ” barely counts as praise, even with an exclamation mark. But unlike that toy-smashing extravaganza — and unlike 2014’s visitations from the “Spider-Man,” “X-Men” and “Godzilla” money trains — “Dawn” is more than a bunch of occasionally thrilling action sequences, emotional gut punches and throwaway jokes arranged in predictable sequence. It is technically impressive and viscerally exciting, for sure, but it also gives you a lot to think, and even to care, about. Starting with the apes themselves. In the final credits, Andy Serkis receives top billing for his performance as Caesar, a role that continues to redefine screen acting in the digital age. His facial expressions and body language are so evocatively and precisely rendered that it is impossible to say where his art ends and the exquisite artifice of Weta Digital, the special-effects company, begins. The same is true of the other main ape performers: Karin Konoval (Maurice); Nick Thurston (Caesar’s son Blue Eyes); Judy Greer (Caesar’s wife, Cornelia); and especially Toby Kebbell as Koba, Caesar’s lieutenant and eventual nemesis. Koba, a survivor of scientific experiments, bears the physical and moral scars of human cruelty. When the apes encounter a scouting party from the city (led by Jason Clarke and Keri Russell), Koba is quick to sound the alarm. The humans, about to run out of fuel, want to restore an abandoned hydroelectric station in ape territory, and they ask Caesar for help. Koba warns that people are a violent, duplicitous, predatory species that should be fought if it can’t be avoided. Caesar, who saw the generous, tender side of humanity when he was hanging out with Mr. Franco and Freida Pinto, is willing to give our kind the benefit of the doubt. There is plenty of evidence — both in the movie and beyond it — to support Koba’s view, but the film comes down squarely, and maybe a little too squishily, on the side of tolerance and cooperation. The ape and human societies are parallel primitive patriarchies (women nurture and worry, while men lead and fight, a disappointing but hardly surprising failure of imagination on the filmmakers’ part), and they are threatened by symmetrical schisms. As Koba opposes Caesar, so does Malcolm (Mr. Clarke’s character) find himself increasingly at odds with Dreyfus (Mr. Oldman), who sees the apes as a mortal threat to be confronted with maximum brutality. And while “Rise” found room for exuberance in the shadow of catastrophe — partly because it seemed so justifiably excited by its own ingenuity — “Dawn,” its title notwithstanding, paints a darker, scarier picture of the future. It also has a grave, brooding beauty, intensified by Michael Giacchino’s wild and subtle score and by the deep, verdant shadows of Michael Seresin’s cinematography. Mr. Reeves has a fine sense of visual detail and also of the eloquence of nonverbal exchanges between characters, digitally enhanced and otherwise. (Ms. Russell and Kodi Smit-McPhee, as her adolescent son, do especially graceful work in limited roles.) The film is full of small, memorable moments and crowded with distinctive personalities on both sides of the ape-human divide.

Some old potion is served up in a reasonably spiffy new bottle in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Resurrecting a lucrative franchise for another go-round 43 years after Charlton Heston first found himself on the short end of the evolutionary pyramid, Fox has wisely steered clear of attempting another remake of the original, which was bungled so badly by Tim Burton a decade back, settling instead on a contemporary scientific yarn that serves as a plausible prequel to all the other films. Strong action, special effects and by far the most credible ape “performances” yet seen will spell box office to inspire chest-thumping in all markets. Making the most of special effects breakthroughs pioneered on Avatar as well as on the extensive ape performance background of Andy "King Kong" Serkis, Rise closes the door on the makeup-and-hairpiece monkeyshines of the original Apes sequels once and for all. The success of the new film pivots on viewer belief that the genetically advanced primates here possess emotional and cranial capacities similar to those of humans; so completely is this achieved that audiences will be cheering for these sensitive creatures as they take revenge on their tormentors by launching an unusually ambitious animal-liberation movement. Of course, it helps tip the balance when the humans on display are as thoroughly dull and/or venal as they are here. The man who makes everything possible is genetic scientist Will Rodman (James Franco), who after more than five years of research experiences a breakthrough with a gene therapy drug called AOZ-112. This cocktail not only pushes one young chimp to incredible new thresholds of smarts and ability, it also has the side effect of reversing the dementia of Will’s out-of-it father (John Lithgow). From the point of view of Will’s greedy boss (David Oyelowo), this is a potential goldmine. But Dad’s Alzheimer’s regresses. And then the chimp, named Caesar, grows into a rough, rebellious, malcontented adolescent, very strong and hard to control; more than any other chimp in history, this one truly has a mind of its own. Eventually, Caesar must leave home for a simian detention facility staffed by a bunch of sadists led by Draco Malfoy himself (or at least the actor who played him in the Harry Potter films, Tom Felton). Things get nasty enough to spark a prison riot, which soon turns into an outright rebellion seemingly joined by the entire ape population of the San Francisco Bay Area. The story arc hammered out by writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver is solid, and director Rupert Wyatt (The Escapist) propels it at an accelerating but unmanic pace, leading to an action climax on, above and under the Golden Gate Bridge that proves perfectly satisfying. Unsurprisingly, the final shot duly foreshadows a sequel, which could be considerably hairier than this first installment falls flat is with the human element. Will is a scientist and his sweetheart Caroline (Freida Pinto) is a vet, so why not make them brainy, opinionated, somewhat eccentric individuals with interesting takes on the extraordinary events their work triggers? Let them argue, debate and be inspired and/or appalled by it all, rather than just ride on their looks. Franco has some nice moments with Lithgow, himself just fine, but otherwise is mostly in fierce register as he contends with adversaries both at work and at the detention center. Pinto looks more beautiful than ever but is playing the most boringly decorous tag-along girlfriend seen onscreen in years. Another questionable element is the extent of the apes’ conversational abilities. When Caesar at last utters his first word, it’s undeniably a big moment. But the most effective simian interchanges are physical rather than verbal, so it will be a tricky tightrope to walk — if the series continues, which it likely will — to move the apes into full speech in a credible way. Serkis invests Caesar with a full measure of personality through the indelibly human look in his eyes. The ape cast is rounded out not only by chimps but by a memorable gorilla and orangutan, both of them fine supporting players. The special effects are most convincing and involving, particularly as the apes move through San Francisco and across the bridge in their attempt to take over George Lucas territory up north. It’s Apes 1, Humans 0 after the first round of this solid reboot of the perennially successful franchise.

Daniel Craig as "Ian Fleming's James Bond 007," and Craig comes closer to the author's original conception of this exceptionally long-lived male fantasy figure than anyone since early Sean Connery. "Casino Royale" sees Bond recharged with fresh toughness and arrogance, along with balancing hints of sadism and humanity, just as the fabled series is reinvigorated by going back to basics. Bond made his debut in “Casino Royale” when it was published in 1953, and while the novel was adapted the following year for American television (Barry Nelson played Bond) and in 1967 became a lame all-star spy send-up featuring Peter Sellers, David Niven and Woody Allen, it remained unavailable to the Eon producers until now. As refashioned for this 21st series installment, the novel’s focus on a high-stakes cards showdown doesn’t kick in for an hour. But Craig’s taking over as the sixth actor to officially portray the secret agent on the bigscreen (not including that first “Casino”) provides a plausible opportunity to examine the character’s promotion to double-0 status, which is neatly done in a brutal black-and-white prologue in which he notches his first two kills. After the pic bleeds into color, Bond pursues a would-be suicide bomber in a madly acrobatic chase through an African construction site, at the end of which he happens to be filmed killing an apparently, if not in fact, unarmed man in images instantly disseminated on the Internet, to the enormous embarrassment of MI6. Welcome to the 21st century, Mr. Bond. Doubling the displeasure of his boss M (Judi Dench happily back for her fifth turn) by surreptitiously entering her flat, Bond ignores her reprimand by high-tailing it to the Bahamas, itself a nice throwback to the film series’ origins in “Dr. No.” Following a cell phone trail of potential terrorist bombers, Bond tracks one, then another in Miami, where an evening that begins at a “Bodyworks” exhibition ends with a high-speed tarmac battle in which the fate of the world’s biggest new jetliner hangs in the balance. Even by this early juncture, the pic has emphatically announced its own personality. It’s comparatively low-tech, with the intense fights mostly conducted up close and personally, the killings accomplished by hand or gun, and without an invisible car in evidence; Bond is more of a lone wolf, Craig’s upper-body hunkiness and mildly squashed facial features giving him the air of a boxer; 007’s got a frequently remarked upon ego, which can cause him to recklessly overreach and botch things, and the limited witticisms function naturally within the characters’ interchanges. As matters advance to the Continent, elements even more unusual in the Bond world of late, comprehensible plotting and palpable male-female frissons, move to the fore. Bond’s enemy is not a Mr. Evil type plotting world domination, but a financier of international terrorism, Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen), who needs to make financial amends by winning a big-pot poker game at the casino in fictional Montenegro. Bond plans to break Le Chiffre for good at the gambling table, and to this end he is fronted $10 million delivered by a most alluring messenger, Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), assigned to keep tabs on the coin. Their initial meeting on board a Euro fast train fairly crackles with a sexual undercurrent as they perceptively size one another up. But Vesper intends to maintain a professional distance from her temporary colleague, whose contest of wills and luck with Le Chiffre in the hushed confines of a private gaming room is repeatedly interrupted during breaks by spasms of violence and attempts on Bond’s life. Yarn does tend to go on a bit once it sails past the two-hour mark, but final stretch contains two indelible interludes crucial to defining this new incarnation of Bond. Constrained nude to a bottomed-out chair, Bond is tortured by Le Chiffre who repeatedly launches a hard-tipped rope upon his nemesis’ most sensitive area, and Craig once and for all claims the character as his own by virtue of the supreme defiance with which he taunts Le Chiffre even in vulnerable extremis. Later, the startling, tragic turn in Bond’s relationship with Vesper provides a measure of understanding for his rake-like tendencies down the line. Script by series vets Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, along with Paul Haggis, hangs together reasonably well and is rewarded for its unaccustomed preoccupation with character by the attentiveness to same by director Martin Campbell, back after having helmed the first Brosnan entry, “GoldenEye,” 11 years ago. “Casino Royale” is the first Bond in a while that’s not over-produced, and while the score by David Arnold, in his fourth Bond outing, is very good, the title song, “You Know My Name,” sung by Chris Cornell over disappointingly designed opening credits, is a dud.

We need to talk about Steven. You might consider it grossly unfair to compare any director to one of the medium’s greatest exponents, but J. J. Abrams is asking for it. Not only has he persuaded Steven Spielberg to serve as producer on his latest film — encouragingly neither sequel, prequel, nor attempt to deodorise a stale franchise — but the very film the tenderfoot filmmaker has written and directed is a fan letter to the spirit of early Spielberg. The kind of cinematic telepathy, touching hearts and minds, that gave us Jaws, Close Encounters and E. T.. This is less covering The Beatles than growing a mop top, strapping on a Hofner bass and channelling an irresistibly catchy synthesis of R&B, rock ’n’ roll and Liverpudlian charisma. Over the next 112 minutes, a motherless boy and his staunch gang of misshapen buddies (a Bash Street arrangement of cute, thin, fat, clever and pyromaniac) will face the great questions of life: how to talk to girls, how to get production values on your DIY zombie flick, and what to do when a despondent alien is deposited, care of an elaborate derailment, in your backyard. As set in 1979, an age crystallised as Spielberg’s imaginary playground. Fathers will struggle to fathom their mooncalf offspring, while confused townsfolk are shipped off in school buses amid a faceless military lockdown. There’s even a POV shot from the creature’s perspective, parting bushes to gaze upon the small-town setting, its jewelled streetlights flaring fetchingly in the lens. Prosecution rests. To cut the film a significant break — and it’s a strong movie — if you’re going to homage, why not follow in the sneaker-steps of the master? A faithfully rearticulated sense of wonder coats Super 8 like varnish — an old-fashioned need to strike emotional chords over the modern urge to plunge headlong into excitement at all costs. A personal blockbuster in honour of the greatest of all personal blockbustermakers. So we also need to talk about J. J.. Super 8 is to a degree autobiographical (about the whole alien visitation thing, he remains tight-lipped). He was that junior filmmaker with a chunky Super 8, brought up on Spielberg and Lucas, just as you know these kids have gobbled up Star Wars and Close Encounters (and snuck into a few Romeros). He transplants his New Jersey youth to a blue-collar Ohio town named Lillian significantly on the down (a chime of modern concerns), where Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) still struggles with the death of his adoring mother in a mill accident. His father, the town’s stoic deputy (Kyle Chandler), is faring worse, flinching from his son’s grief. A familiar refrain for anyone who caught Lost and Star Trek (or E. T.) — the legacy of the absentee parent. Joel finds solace spending the summer goofing with his schlubby comrades. Led by bumptious, trumpet-voiced ‘director’, Charles (Riley Griffiths), they are intent on making their own film within the film: a nutty, lovable zombie skit shot on the eponymous camera, with homemade make-up care of Jack’s obsession with painting figurines and movie-model kits. His room is a junkyard of ’70s geek clutter, but these are geeks from a pre-internet age, happy to draw deep on fresh air, unsure growing up offers them a whole lot. The pressure, laid down by Spielberg’s unyielding template, was to find regular boys, gummy with youth, but enlivened by the camera. Thankfully, the kids are more than alright. They’re fabulous: yearningly fresh-faced and infantile, effortlessly colliding with the Brownian motion of a boyhood of in-jokes, flash sulks and bike-rides through the balmy sunlight of possibility (a mood as much redolent of Rob Reiner’s Stand By Me as Spielberg). En masse, they stand in tremulous awe at Elle Fanning’s Alice (spookily reminiscent of Erika Eleniak in E. T.), who has agreed to co-star in their endeavours, revealing a startling ability to, like, act. She’s also a precious commodity for Abrams: the budding romance between Joe and Alice gives the film its heartbeat. Both are caught in the slipstream of wounded fathers, Joel’s tragedy movingly intertwined with Alice’s fragmenting family. It’s nowhere close to E. T. — what is? — but amongst the hullabaloo of summer, Super 8 is something to cherish: a beautifully made homage to better times, and better movies.

"King Arthur" claims to be "the untold true story that inspired the legend." In the name of accuracy, apparently, some familiar legendary elements have been altered or dropped altogether. Merlin (Stephen Dillane), it turns out, was not a magician but the shadowy leader of the Woads, a guerrilla army of Pictish freedom fighters with stringy hair, blue faces and tattooed bodies. Since the knights of the Round Table are stubbornly pagan (and skeptical of their leader's Christianity, which is wobbly at best), they are not about to go off in search of the Holy Grail. And though Lancelot (Ioan Gruffudd) at one point casts a smoldering glance in the direction of Guinevere (Keira Knightley), nothing more comes of the mythic triangle of king, queen and knight. Lancelot, in any case, is more of a fighter than a lover, and so, in spite of an obligatory cuddle with Arthur on the night before the big battle, is Guinevere. Historians will debate the veracity of all this, assuming they have nothing better to do. But it will be clear to most moviegoers that this true story, far from being untold, was inspired by at least a half-dozen previous movies, from "The Seven Samurai" to "Braveheart." David Franzoni, the screenwriter, also wrote "Gladiator," and Clive Owen's Arthur, like Russell Crowe's Maximus, both faithfully serves the Roman empire and turns against its authoritarian abuses. He and his knights are sent on a rescue mission that recalls the one undertaken by Bruce Willis in "Tears of the Sun," the previous movie directed by Antoine Fuqua, who directed "King Arthur." Really, though, originality is not the point of this movie, any more than historical verisimilitude is. It is a blunt, glowering B picture, shot in murky fog and battlefield smoke, full of silly-sounding pomposity and swollen music (courtesy of the prolifically bombastic Hans Zimmer). The combat scenes, though boisterous and brutal, are no more coherent than the story, which requires almost as much exposition as the last "Star Wars" movie. Luckily there is an element of broad, brawny camp that prevents "King Arthur" from being a complete drag. In this version Arthur's knights are a ragged band of foreign conscripts stationed in the shadow of Hadrian's Wall, where they fight an occasional skirmish with the pesky Woads, who gyre and gimble in the wabe. Arthur's mixed parentage — he is half Roman and half British — results in an identity crisis as he simultaneously grows disillusioned with the corruption and cruelty of Rome and succumbs to Guinevere's Woady charms. Arthur's men, for reasons efficiently explained in the first 10 minutes of the movie, are required to serve the empire for 15 years. They complain about the English weather, which was even drearier back in the fifth century, but their devotion to Arthur is absolute. Although they have earned their freedom, the knights are sent off on one last mission, which acquaints them with both the evils committed in the name of Rome and its church, and with the threat of the Saxon invaders, who are waging a vicious war of conquest with armor-piercing arrows and the scariest blond hair extensions since "White Chicks." Cerdic, the Saxon leader, is played by Stellan Skarsgard, whose halting, throaty delivery and gleefully hammy villainy confirm his stature as the Swedish Christopher Walken. Cerdic's lieutenant is his son Cynric (Til Schweiger), who sports a spiffy plaited soul patch and a slightly different accent, and who leads the Saxons into a battle on the ice that is the film's most original and satisfying set piece. The rest of it is mostly grunting, roaring and hacking, conducted by some fine, cheerfully slumming actors, notably Ray Winstone (as a lusty, cantankerous knight named Bors) and Mads Mikkelsen (as the enigmatic Tristan). Arthur, who will somehow establish freedom for England by being declared its king, is a worrier as well as a warrior, and Mr. Owen brings a certain wariness to the role, as if he were, like his character, reluctant to commit the full force of his charisma to a cause he doesn't quite understand. Ms. Knightley, on the other hand, throws herself bodily into every scene, sighing her way through the gauzy love-making montage and appearing at the climactic battle the next morning in face paint and a smashing leather combat brassiere, hurling herself at the Saxon invaders with full-throated Woad rage.

In "Evolution," Ivan Reitman's scattershot sci-fi comedy, Orlando Jones and David Duchovny play community college science instructors who happen upon an alien life-form that threatens to take over the world. A meteor has crashed into the Arizona desert. Examining the blue- green slime that oozes from beneath its surface ("It's a rock that bleeds!"), Mr. Duchovny's character, a disgraced former Pentagon biologist named Ira Kane, discovers a colony of squirming star-shaped amoebas. These quickly mutate into more complex microorganisms, and then into computer-animated flatworms, insects, slimy lizards and angry primates. The movie itself evolves in reverse, starting life as a moderately clever grab bag of high-concept noodling and half-witty badinage before descending into the primordial ooze of explosions and elaborate lower- intestinal gags. Mr. Duchovny and Mr. Jones make an amusing pair. Their interracial shtick is reminiscent of that of Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor in movies like "Silver Streak" and "Stir Crazy," but with the ragged anxiety of the late 70's smoothed over by the referential pop-culture cool of the present day. Mr. Duchovny works hard to show some range beyond Agent Mulder's morbid intensity while still poking fun at his "X-Files" pedigree. "No government," Ira snaps when Harry suggests alerting the federal authorities about their discovery. "I know how those people operate." In his first scenes, Mr. Duchovny, who was a Ph.D. candidate in literature before becoming an alien tracker for the Fox network, captures the easygoing cynicism of the second-rate academic with frightening accuracy. Virtually everyone in his class gets an A, except for two obese brothers whose identical papers, titled "Cells Are Bad," earn them C-minuses. But compared with Harry, Ira is Jonas Salk. Mr. Jones, best known as the demented pitchman for 7-Up, has quick timing and effortless improvisational flair, as well as an absolute, and in this case welcome, disregard for consistencies of character. Mr. Duchovny is constrained by a silly back story involving his mishandling of a Pentagon-sponsored anthrax vaccine (the laughs never stop!) and a love interest (played, for no good reason, by Julianne Moore); Mr. Jones is free to mug and gangle to his heart's content. "I've seen this movie," he says as an alien bug crawls around inside his protective suit. "The black dude dies first." No, but he is subject to some fairly gross indignities: the bug must be extracted from his nether regions with forceps. Later, as payback, he administers a dandruff-shampoo enema to the shopping-mall-size mass of protoplasm that threatens civilization as we know it. Unfortunately, civilization as we know it — that is, the highly evolved state of being that can find no better use for its biological advantages than the production of movies like this one — triumphs in the end. That dandruff shampoo appears to be a clever product placement, a moment that the rest of the movie, for all its ickily impressive digital flora and fauna and its cast of good sports, rarely lives up to. Seann William Scott, in the designated-doofus (or David Arquette) role of a hapless aspiring firefighter, has some moments of slack-jawed charm. Ms. Moore falls down a lot and bumps into things. She's sexy, she's a scientist, she's clumsy; comic invention of this caliber makes you sorry the writers' strike never happened. From time to time an actor — usually Mr. Duchovny, Mr. Jones or Ted Levine, who plays a Pentagon heavy — will send up a tired action- movie or television-show commonplace: "Let's do this!" "It's payback time!" "Be careful out there!" But the spoofing of movie clichés has become a cliché in its own right, and beneath the hyperactivity of "Evolution" is an abiding laziness. In a Darwinian universe, this is a dangerous thing. The biggest frustration in "Evolution" is that it squanders an interesting premise. The aliens evolve so quickly, compressing hundreds of millions of years into a few short days, that you can't help wondering what they will look like when they turn into us. But we never get past the angry apes. Maybe in "Evolution II" the process of natural selection will be allowed to proceed further, and we can witness the full flowering of superior life-forms — or at least see whether they have it in them to make better movies than this one.

Among the reasons "King Kong" - the old 100-minute black-and-white version, that is - has retained its appeal over the years is that it reminds audiences of the do-it-yourself, seat-of-the-pants ethic of early motion pictures. In 1933, when RKO released it, sound film was in its infancy, and film itself was in the midst of a coltish, irrepressible adolescence. Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack, who directed the first "Kong," understood the alchemical convergence of gimmickry and sublimity that lay at the heart of the medium's unrivaled potential to generate spectacle and sensation. That potential still exists, but it may be harder to find these days, given how much bigger and more self-important movies have become. In his gargantuan, mightily entertaining remake, "King Kong," Peter Jackson tries to pay homage to the original even as he labors to surpass it. The sheer audacious novelty of the first "King Kong" is not something that can be replicated, but in throwing every available imaginative and technological resource into the effort, Mr. Jackson comes pretty close. The threshold of sensation has risen drastically since the 30's, when movies were still associated with older, somewhat disreputable forms of popular culture. Unlike the 1976 remake, which tried to drag the story into the corporate present, Mr. Jackson's version returns it to the Great Depression, reminding us that the road to the multiplex stretches back through the music halls and burlesque houses of those bygone days. Of course, this new "King Kong" (written by Mr. Jackson and his frequent collaborators Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens) cost more than $200 million to make and can hardly be called scruffy. It arrives burdened with impossible expectations and harassed by competition from all sides. The director, who not so long ago was making low-budget monster movies in his native New Zealand, clearly wants to hold onto the artisanal, eccentric spirit of the past - his own and that of the art form he loves. But at the same time he must live up to the success of his "Lord of the Rings" trilogy and prove to a glutted, gluttonous audience that large-scale, effects-driven filmmaking is still capable of novelty, freshness and emotional impact. He succeeds through a combination of modesty and reckless glee, topping himself at every turn and reveling in his own showmanship. His "King Kong," though it has a few flourishes of tongue-in-cheek knowingness - including references to Cooper and Fay Wray and shots that directly quote the original - never feels self-conscious or arch. And though it presents the interspecies love story between Kong (Andy Serkis, who also plays a shipboard cook named Lumpy) and Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) with touching sincerity, the picture wears its themes lightly, waving away the somber, allegorical sententiousness that too many blockbusters ("Lord of the Rings" included) rely upon to justify their exorbitant costs. The movie is, almost by definition, too much - too long, too big, too stuffed with characters and over-the-top set pieces - but it is animated by an impish, generous grace. Three hours in the dark with a giant, angry ape should leave you feeling battered and exhausted, but "King Kong" is as memorable for its sweetness as for its sensationalism. After setting a nostalgic mood with Art Deco titles and James Newton Howard's old-fashioned movie-palace overture, "King Kong" plunges into a New York of vaudeville houses, soup lines and Hooverville encampments. Ann, a winsome, wholesome hoofer, is performing in a threadbare revue that shuts down just as Carl Denham (Jack Black) loses the star of his next movie. Somehow, he entices not only Ann, but also her favorite playwright, the Barton Finkish Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody), onto a rusty tub whose unsavory captain (Thomas Kretschmann) captures and transports exotic animals. Denham's plan is to take his film crew - which also includes his anxious assistant (Colin Hanks) and lantern-jawed star (Kyle Chandler) - to Skull Island, where they will discover Kong. The rapport between Ms. Watts and Mr. Serkis is extraordinary, even though it is mediated by fur, latex, optical illusions and complicated effects. Mr. Serkis, who also played Gollum in the "Lord of the Rings" movies, is redefining screen acting for the digital age, while Ms. Watts incarnates the glamour and emotional directness of classical Hollywood. Together they form one of the most unlikely and affecting screen couples since Anthony Quinn and Giulietta Masina did their beast and beauty act in "La Strada." The climax of "King Kong" - one of the most familiar sequences in movies, and one that never grows old - exemplifies both tendencies. It is shameless and exalted, absurd and sublime, vulgar and grand. It's what movies were made for.

Jesus of Nazareth spent 40 days in the desert. By comparison, Superman of Hollywood languished almost 20 years in development hell. Those years apparently raised the bar fearsomely high. Last seen larking about on the big screen in the 1987 dud "Superman IV," the Man of Steel has been resurrected in a leaden new film not only to fight for truth, justice and the American way, but also to give Mel Gibson's passion a run for his box-office money. Where once the superhero flew up, up and away, he now flies down, down, down, sent from above to save mankind from its sins and what looked like another bummer summer. The super-size (more than two and a half hours) "Superman Returns" was written by Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris, working off a story hatched by them and the director, Bryan Singer, after what appears to have been repeat viewings of Richard Donner's "Superman." Released in 1978, that film ushered Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's original comic creation into the blockbuster age with frothy wit and a cast that included Marlon Brando in a creamy scoop of white hair and Gene Hackman in clover. Christopher Reeve, of course, wore the cape and tights, while Margot Kidder did a fine approximation of the young Katharine Hepburn at her most coltish. Valerie Perrine and Ned Beatty added some laughs, while Glenn Ford supplied a pinch of gravitas. As nutritious as a box of Cracker Jack and just as yummy, "Superman" was at once a goof and a self-conscious bid at modern mythmaking. Years later, what resonates aren't Mr. Donner's action scenes, which look crude compared with what he would do later in the "Lethal Weapon" series, but how fluidly he changes tones from the iconic (as when the supertoddler lifts a truck off his Earth father) to the playful (as when the souped-up adult realizes that the closetlike phone booth is a thing of the past). Mr. Reeve worked the tonal changes with similar ease, delivering a superhero whose earnestness was strategically offset by his fumbling, bumbling, all-too-human twin, who was just the ticket for the post-Watergate, pre-Indiana Jones moment. Mr. Singer's Superman, played by Brandon Routh, is a hero of rather different emotional colors, most muted. Like Christopher Nolan's "Batman Begins," Mr. Singer's effort reworks the legend against a vaguely modern, timeless backdrop that blends the thematically old with the technologically new. The story opens with some necrophiliac wizardry and Brando newly arisen as Superman's extraterrestrial father. Well represented even from beyond, the dead actor receives billing for his spectral turn, squeezed between Eva Marie Saint, who plays Superman's earth mother, and Tristan Lake Leabu, who plays Lois Lane's young son. The Daily Planet's star reporter is in turn played by Kate Bosworth, whose glum mien and curtain of brown hair suggests that blondes really do have more fun. Lois, however, doesn't enter the picture until after the filmmakers have laid the story's Oedipal foundation, which finds two men saying goodbye to the much older women who will, intentionally or not, shape their destinies. In one corner, Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey taking up the role played by Mr. Hackman) bids cold adieu to the crone who will make him fantastically rich; in another, Superman again digs a fiery trough into the Kent family farm upon crash landing. This time, it's the grown man who brings tears to his mother's eyes and who stares at the sinking Kansas (actually Australian) sun, weighing his responsibility to humankind after a five-year hiatus crossing the galaxies to visit his original home. It's too bad that Mr. Singer and his colleagues don't really do anything substantial with the good-guy-bad-guy routine. Superman may be a super-creation, but it's his villains rather than his dual identity that have usually given him a kick. Unlike his brooding and angst-ridden rivals in the superhero game, his alter ego is only as interesting as the comic book artist or the actor adding shades of gray to Clark Kent's business suit. Part of the charm of Mr. Reeve's interpretation was that a guy this impossibly handsome, who literally towers over everyone in the office, could hide behind a slouch and oversize eyeglasses. It was absurd, but then so too was the idea that a powerful extraterrestrial would hang around Earth to take the kind of abuse perennially heaped on his human half. As he proved with his first two installments of "The X-Men" franchise, Mr. Singer likes to make important pop entertainments that trumpet their seriousness as loudly as they deploy their bangs. It's hard not to think that Superman isn't the only one here with a savior complex.

An intensely claustrophobic, gut-wrenching thriller about two policemen's desperate efforts to stop an ingenious serial killer whose work is inspired by the seven deadly sins, this weirdly off-kilter suspenser goes well beyond the usual police procedural or killer-on-a-rampage yarn due to a fine script, striking craftsmanship and a masterful performance by Morgan Freeman. David Fincher’s second feature, after Alien³, cuts against most expectations for this sort of genre piece: it’s not a buddy picture; the murders themselves are not actually depicted; and the usual gritty big-city realism has been replaced by a highly stylized, borderline-arty visual conception that greatly cranks up the psychological and physical intensity of the drama, by first-time screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker. At the outset, world-weary veteran cop William Somerset (Freeman) and the cocky newcomer due to replace him, David Mills (Brad Pitt), can barely tolerate each other. Obliged to take the kid on his rounds, Somerset pursues an investigation of the death of an enormously obese man who appears to have exploded from eating too much. The next day, an influential defense attorney is found gruesomely murdered, and when the words ‘Gluttony’ and ‘Greed’ are discovered, respectively, at the scenes, Somerset correctly predicts that there will be five more murders to cover sloth, pride, lust, envy and wrath. The unidentified city in which the grisly yarn unravels is subject to heavy rain through the early days of the inquiry, which provides the first element in Fincher’s channeling of images. Virtuoso French cinematographer Darius Khondji and production designer Arthur Max have sculpted a dark, murky world, parts of which are illuminated only by flashlight and much of the rest of which is suffused in a pea-soup green that defies penetration. The film has been hand-tooled with precision and to powerful effect. Freeman’s is a supremely nuanced, moving performance as the seasoned, bruised and solitary Somerset. This is screen acting at its best. Pitt turns in a determined, energetic, creditable job as the eager young detective. Gwyneth Paltrow gives as much human dimension as possible to her few scenes as Pitt’s sensitive, uncertain wife. Except for a chase sequence, pic features no overt violence, but the gruesome handiwork of the killer is shown in detail, in part courtesy of special makeup effects wiz Rob Bottin.

One of the hallmarks of a David Lynch film is the element of surprise -- the sense of not knowing what will happen next and the queasy dread that what you're about to see could disturb and haunt you and linger in your head for a long time. Lynch established that agenda in "Eraserhead," his first feature- length film, and he hasn't abandoned it to a futile quest for mainstream acceptance. It's impossible to imagine Lynch making a conventional film with "normal" people and "normal" entertainment values -- a fact that binds his fans to him but alienates many critics and moviegoers. In "Lost Highway," which opens today at Bay Area theaters, Lynch continues his exploration of the unknown and delivers a dreamlike meditation on reality, identity and paranoia. Set in a bland city that resembles Los Angeles, "Lost Highway" stars Bill Pullman, fresh from play ing the enthusiastic president in "Independence Day," as Fred Madison, a spooked saxophonist who finds himself terrorized by a man who enters his house when he's asleep and videotapes him and his girlfriend Renee (Patricia Arquette) as they sleep. At a party, he meets a smirking trickster, played in ghostly white makeup by Robert Blake, who declares himself the culprit. Blake invites Pullman to dial his own phone number and to listen as Blake, who's standing before him, "answers" at the other end of the line. That's just a taste of what Lynch and co-writer Barry Gifford, whose novel "Wild at Heart" inspired Lynch's 1990 film of the same name, have to offer. There's also a murder; a fire; a personality transformation involving an auto mechanic (Balthazar Getty); a gangster's moll, also played by Arquette, who cons Getty into committing a crime; a memory lapse by Getty; a reappearance by Pullman; and a series of bizarre foreshadowings and precognitive images that may or may not pro vide clues to the mystery of "Lost Highway." The result is a world, part film noir, part apocalyptic acid nightmare and pure Lynch, in which nothing can be trusted or relied upon -- least of all our psychic well-being. It's a weird movie, in that spooky/sicko, deadpan way that Lynch's movies always are, and it's guaranteed to repel anyone who likes entertainment wrapped in tidy resolutions and optimistic fade- outs. The visuals, Angelo Badalamenti's music and Lynch's sound design -- his perennial sound designer, Berkeley's Alan Splet, died in 1994 -- are all effective, and the comic bits, specifically Robert Loggia's scene as a mobster berating a tailgating motorist, are all effective. Filmmakers such as Lynch deserve our admiration for creating new cinematic idioms and exploring new ground. At the same time, "Lost Highway" often feels like a stunt -- like an arcane, deliberately perverse game that Lynch knew would never make sense. It's also feels, with its similarities to "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me," "Blue Velvet" and "Wild at Heart," like overly familiar territory. Lynch's great wish is to shock and arouse us, but in using the same kind of music, camera effects and offbeat editing rhythms over and over, his work is beginning to look like variations on a single theme. Arquette, whose low-in-affect style is perfectly matched to Lynch's, gives the strongest, most memorable performance -- and brings to mind Kim Novak's similar dual roles in "Vertigo." There is also a cameo by Richard Pryor, along with appearances by Gary Busey, rock star Henry Rollins and Natasha Gregson Wagner, daughter of the late Natalie Wood.

Forgive yourself for thinking you've seen A Bug's Life somewhere before. A computer-generated ant movie. An accident-prone hero who doesn't quite fit in. A rebellious princess in peril. An insect evil-doer with a comedy henchman. Sound familiar? DreamWorks' Antz unpeeled a similar micro-fable three months ago, having hustled its CG fairy-story through production to beat Pixar's ant-flick into cinemas. Yet, despite the speedy turnaround, Antz was excellent. How does the latest project from the Toy Story team stand up against it? Although the themes (individuality, redemption, loyalty) are undeniably similar, the two are very different in style and approach. Antz is more adult and clever, while A Bug's Life has a pre-teen cuteness and is pitched squarely at the family. Antzuses movie star voiceovers, A Bug's Life plunders the jabber of TV sitcom regulars. And while Antz is often spectacular and astonishing to gaze at, A Bug's Life is arguably more beautiful, full of gloriously translucent leaves, glistening exo-skeletons and iridescent butterfly wings. Building on the detail and complexity that was a hallmark of Toy Story, Pixar's flawless recreation of light and shadow, facial expressions and natural landscaping is a joy to behold. The main strength of A Bug's Life is that Pixar has again created a miniature world which could never exist in a live-action movie. Admittedly, the story takes a while to gain momentum, but after the mandatory scene-setting and character introductions, A Bug's Life soon becomes a satisfying, very funny cartoon. It has its inventive moments: Flik creates a telescope by using a rolled-up leaf, with a water droplet for the lens. It has its in-jokes ("It's a bug-eat-bug world, one of those Circle Of Life things"). It also has a rush of hugely effective insect gaggery: buzzing flies ordering a poo platter in a bar; a down-and-out bug on a street corner holding a sign that says: "Kid pulled my wings off". Taking full advantage of (but rarely stretching) the digital technology, A Bug's Life finally hits speed when the imperfect hero discovers PT Flea's troupe of circus bugs - less a Magnificent Seven, more a Bugnificent Eight. David Hyde Pierce's stick insect (wants to be a clown, is always cast as a stick), Joe Ranft's bloated Bavarian caterpillar Heimlich and Denis Leary's male ladybird nab most of the screentime, while a rhino beetle, a butterfly, a spider, two woodlice (grunts courtesy of comic Mike McShane) and a praying mantis (voiced by Lost In Space's original Dr Smith, Jonathan Harris) round off the good guys. Kevin Spacey, meanwhile, provides the calculated menace behind the CG carapace of bad-guy Hopper. A Bug's Life lacks the full crossover appeal of Toy Story, but it features some phenomenal moments. The sequence where the fragile ant colony is attacked by a bird is nothing less than sensational, while a simple rainstorm is transformed into a raging, destructive blitz of insect-crushing water bombs. Computer animation may now be less of a novelty, but Pixar's extraordinary fantasy (part Western, part gangster movie) still has the capacity to impress, blending visual and verbal slapstick with spectacular action and virtual stuntage. So which is better - Antz or A Bug's Life? The answer isn't clear. Why not see them both? Antz has the edge where an adult audience is concerned (although kids may not get all the gags and political sideswipes), but as a family movie, A Bug's Life is a friendlier night out, hitting home on a multitude of levels for a range of age-groups. With something for everyone, Pixar's second feature is spirited, very funny and thoroughly charming. It starts slowly, and the characters can't quite shake their digital perfection, but with a rich tapestry of colours, energetic characterisation and magical attention to the tiniest details, A Bug's Life is a worthy successor to Toy Story. A fun, often astonishing bug movie which is magnifciently rendered and beautifully scripted, and proves computer animation can appeal to all ages. Make sure you don't leave the cinema until you've watched the hilarious out-takes in the end credits.

Time to fire up the critical Black & Decker: Somebody—there are six credited screenwriters—really wasn’t clear on the concept. The guy's called Leatherface (Dan Yeager, behind the skins). He lumbers after people, kills them and then his family eats them. How hard is that? After a brief montage from Tobe Hooper’s feverish 1974 classic, we’re back at the murder house, where—what’s this?—a bunch of yahoo hicks shoot down the remaining cannibal clan and torch the porch. These yokels are our villains now, and unfortunately, they’re a lot less scary or suggestive. Bereavement’s Alexandra Daddario, playing a distant Leatherface cousin set to inherit the manor (and manner), continues her sad career in unbuttoned bondage, and the 3-D effects are especially ruinous.

For those who have lost track of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise, here's the deal with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning: It's a prequel to the 2003 remake The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, not a prequel to Tobe Hooper's original 1974 The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. And it has no connection with Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation, starring Matthew McConaughey and Renée Zellweger before they knew better. Got it? Okay. Here's everything else you need to know about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning: It's really gory and really dull. Mostly just dull. And it's far worse than a cash-in prequel to a mercenary Texas Chainsaw Massacre sequel has any right to be. Hooper's film has a blood-drenched reputation, but it built its scares out of skillfully crafted suspense. Like its 2003 predecessor, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning relies on made-you-jump shocks and more fake entrails than a Jaycees haunted house. It wastes no time in getting to either, but it's still a tremendous waste of time. In drill-sergeant mode, as always, character actor R. Lee Ermey returns as the patriarch of an inbred, cannibalistic Texas clan which, this time out, terrorizes two attractive, unfortunate couples. The male half of one (Matthew Bomer) is on his way to re-enlist for service in Vietnam, not knowing that his brother (Taylor Handley) plans to dodge the draft in Mexico. That whole question quickly becomes moot once Ermey and his adopted, leather-faced "nephew" start chopping them up one by one, a process that sadly takes up much of the movie. There's a lot to dislike about TTCM: TB, beginning with the fact that it repeats whole scenes from its immediate predecessor. They didn't work that well the first time around, and they aren't improved here. Really, the film is only worth considering as part of a trend of films that seem to exist to show audiences what torture looks like in graphic detail, almost as if torture had become some kind of national anxiety. But that couldn't be the case, could it?

Another Long March to the Slaughterhouse! With a budget many times that of the 1974 drive-in classic on which it is based, Marcus Nispel's "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" delivers proportionately fewer thrills and no discernible suspense. It is, instead, a long march to the slaughterhouse that seems to take forever to get going and, once it does, goes nowhere that hasn't been visited before by more talented filmmakers. Inspired as much by Jonathan Demme's 1991 "Silence of the Lambs" (from which it borrows its repulsively detailed inventory of a killer's lair) and by David Fincher's 1995 "Seven" (the bled-out color and atmosphere of decay) as by Tobe Hooper's original film, this movie seems painfully derivative just where Mr. Hooper's was technically crude but quite original: in its application of the psychology of horror. Very much a product of its time, the original was a paranoid vision in which a band of hippies fell into the clutches of a monstrous family evolved from Richard Nixon's middle Americans. Mr. Hooper imagined the rotting nuclear family formed by the Sawyer clan (oddly renamed the Hewitts in the remake) exacting its final parental revenge on the flower-power generation, represented as a group of helpless children. In the remake, with Hollywood's current master of budgetary excess, Michael Bay ("Pearl Harbor") as co-producer, the killings have little sociological or psychological resonance. This is a blunt and graphic gore film, replete with close-ups of splattered brain matter and twitching severed limbs. To his credit, Mr. Nispel, a veteran of music videos making his first feature, does not take refuge in camp humor; he plays the violence as straight and as punishingly as possible. But punishment is not what the action public of 2003 is looking for: since "The Silence of the Lambs," the audience has been encouraged to identify with charismatic killers as they go about their business, something the remade "Chainsaw" staunchly refuses to offer. From R. Lee Ermey's degenerate small-town sheriff to Andrew Bryniarski's hulking Leatherface (the chainsaw-wielding killer, now with a mask fashioned out of human flesh), the villains are either too grotesque or too remote to invite easy assimilation. Reduced to identifying, uncomfortably enough, with the victims (chiefly, the lovely but inexpressive Jessica Biel), the audience made its dissatisfaction vocally clear at a recent New York preview screening of Mr. Nispel's film, which opens today nationwide. Rather than exhilaration, this bilious film offers only entrapment and despair. It's about as much fun as sitting in on an autopsy.

Quentin Tarantino’s True Romance script is an elaborate, extended fantasy that sees a geeky shop assistant transformed into a great lover, a vengeful vigilante and, ultimately, a smooth criminal. Meanwhile, the story lacks any kind of emotional or moral consequence: the hero gets his father killed, the heroine guns down a cop during a drug deal gone sour, but they both drive off happily into the sunset, untainted by the mayhem they have left in their wake. Are we expected to buy into this bloody fairytale? Are we supposed to like these self-obsessed, homicidal maniacs? The answer to both these questions is a resounding yes, because the wishes being fulfilled here belong to former geeky shop assistant Quentin Tarantino, and he had the talent to flesh out his fantasy with vividly-drawn characters spouting instantly classic dialogue during jaw-dropping set-pieces. The I’d **** Elvis speech that introduces comic book clerk Clarence, the rooftop confession and declaration of love by Alabama, the showdown with Drexl, Virgil at the motel and, of course, the Sicilian scene are all hugely appealing to any budding hopeful. What Tarantino couldnt have known when he was scribbling away behind the counter at Video Archives, however, is that they would be equally attractive to established and, in some cases, legendary stars. Despite his earlier reservations, Pitt signed on to play a bone idle stoner flatmate; the notoriously picky Gary Oldman sank his post-Dracula teeth into the role of a racially-confused pimp; and Chris Penn, Tom Sizemore and Samuel L. Jackson happily played virtual bit parts. Add never-to-be-bettered work from Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette to the mix, and you already have something special. But the genuinely great moments in True Romance belong to James Gandolfini, Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken. Even with an excellent screenplay and a rogues gallery of protagonists waiting to be brought to life, any film needs the right director, and True Romance boasts an ideal helmer in the unlikely shape of Tony Scott. Who better than the director of Top Gun to bring an arrested adolescents fantasy to life? Scott verges on self-parody in terms of the gloss and pace he brings to proceedings, giving the movie a relentless energy that never allows the audience to stop and consider the absurdity of it all. Alabamas execution of Virgil, complete with feral scream and lovingly photographed, blood-soaked breasts, earned the film notoriety and a run-in with the censors, although Scotts approach to the material is best summed up by another, less controversial creative decision. The script has Clarences initial drug-hawking meeting with Elliot take place, unremarkably enough, in a zoo, but the director wanted something with a little more pizzazz, so he set the sequence on a rollercoaster. Tarantino is overstating the case when he compares Scott to undervalued auteurs of the past (Douglas Sirk he aint), but theres no doubt he was perfect to orchestrate this wild ride. This is not only an immensely entertaining violent action but genuinely romantic at times. Tarantino's dialogue is as sparkling as ever!

Eleven years after Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) and her posse last tangled with a mad slasher/killer, the Scream series has been exhumed. Ignoring or forgetting that the final part of the original trilogy, Scream 3, underwhelmed in terms of popular reaction and ticket sales, the filmmakers have exhaled a last, rattling breath of desperation and returned to a well that ran dry last millennium and hasn't gained any moisture since then. There's no real story here; Scream 4 offers little more than a group of familiar characters wandering around a horror movie setting and uttering self-referential one-liners as the body count mounts... and mounts... and mounts. Scream's brand of horror, which lampooned the slasher genre while simultaneously embracing it, was fun and breezy in 1996. In 2011, it's about as fresh as the whiff of something stale and rank from a crypt. Scream 4 is so obsessed with the self-referential element that made the original Scream unique that it loses the capacity to be genuinely scary or funny. As in the recursive opening sequence (which features cameos by the likes of Anna Paquin and Kristen Bell), it tries too hard. The first two Screams worked because they were effortless. Scream 4, like its predecessor, shows the screenwriter's seams. The story is thin and belabored - more an excuse to encounter old friends and revel in new gore than the "revision" promised by the promotional material. The tag line is "New Decade. New Rules." But it doesn't seem like much has changed, except that the word "reboot" gets mentioned a few times. Despite regurgitating elements from its predecessors, Scream 4 is not a reboot; it's a sequel. Toward the end, there's an opportunity for Scream 4 to break from the monotony of Horror 101 and, at least for a moment, I thought it was going to do it. Just as the glee was beginning to well up within me at the audacity being displayed by everyone involved (the actors, director Wes Craven, scriptwriter Kevin Williamson), the bubble burst. It's a cruel tease, more frustrating that the pieces of fruit in Austin Powers. The near-brush with boldness makes the flaccid conclusion all the more disappointing. I doubt this is the last we'll see of the Scream series since horror franchises are as incapable of being killed as their monstrous stars. It is less likely that Craven will be back for a Scream 5. To quote Danny Glover, he's getting too old for this **** Scream 4 will probably prove sufficiently profitable that the Weinsteins will dial up another one, and this series will transform into what it once gleefully parodied - if it's not there already. Not a Horror Masterpiece nor a Disaster.

They say the third time's a charm. In the case of the Scream movie series, the Wes Craven/Kevin Williamson collaboration credited for having revived the slasher genre in the '90s, this cliché proves to be a falsehood. The most recent (and hopefully final) chapter in the comedy/horror trilogy comes across as a lame regurgitation of material already presented. There are no real surprises, and the whole affair has the feeling of something left too long in the pot to stew. The life and energy is gone. What began as a lively, intelligent series suffused with self-referential humor has turned into just another slice-and-dice-by-numbers affair. Scream 3 isn't just the weakest of the movies, it's the kind of thing that the original Scream lampooned with affectionate glee. Scream 3 features three good moments, but they're hardly enough to save the movie from the tedious spiral of repetitiveness it is trapped in. The first is a from-beyond-the-grave video lecture by Randy (Jamie Kennedy), who offers up the "rules of the trilogy." For example, "events in the third segment always go back to the beginning" and "even the hero can die in the final chapter." (One that he doesn't mention, and which proves true in this case, is that the final installment of any trilogy is usually the worst. The examples Randy cites, Star Wars and The Godfather, are classic examples of this.) Then there's a brief cameo by cult heroes Jay and Silent Bob, who are given a couple of lines (well, at least Jay is. Finally, Carrie Fisher appears as a receptionist who bemoans not having gotten the part of Princess Leia in Star Wars because she wouldn't sleep with George Lucas. When it comes to storyline, character development, and pacing, Scream 3 strikes out. The movie drags along from one predictable slaying to the next, and the only real scares along the way are the "boo!" moments when something innocuous jumps out of the shadows just before the real killer strikes. Meanwhile, the level of humor in Scream 3 is way down. Parker Posey (as the actress playing Gale in the Stab series) has a few amusing lines, but the ironic dialogue and cute references to other horror films, which were wearing thin in Scream 2, are now positively threadbare. Once, I wrote that Scream 3 would have to do something radical or inventive to avoid becoming tiresome. Unfortunately, there's nothing here that even the most inexperienced horror film fan would call innovative, and the predictable result is a movie that pales in comparison with its predecessors. Thus far, 2000 has been a very bad year for films, and Scream 3 does nothing to reverse the trend.